Today Tom and I discussed creating a new Classroom Communication System with a developer from physics. We had spent a few days discussing the features that the system needs to have and today we primarily discussed platform issues. Tom and I have more experience with developing web applications using PHP. This other fellow knows java best. We batted things around a bit and never quite came down firmly on one side or the other. I think we can probably do things in Java that can't be easily done with a web client, but I think we can implement the web client more quickly. My thinking at this point is for Tom and I to build a proof-of-concept system using PHP and simple webpages and to try out using XUL. The other fellow is a bit worried about tying ourself to Mozilla, but as long as we build it in a fairly generic way, I don't see that as a problem. We can implement it as a single webpage, or breat it up into a few smaller pages that interact through an XUL frontend.