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My stack overflow question. I'll just repost what was posted on there...

Intro
We have a project to design and implement this semester. For our project, we chose to create an inventory system that uses Android phones for clients. More information on that portion of the project.

The Problem
The next problem that we have run into is that we are to design some kind of intermediary server that authenticates users and regulates what commands are issued to the database -- in other words, an application server.

We are a bit constrained for time (especially this semester with this project) and we realize that this kind of a problem has already been solved by people much smarter than us.

Our Ideas So Far
As the title says, what is the easiest application server to implement with Java-based clients? We currently have 3 separate clients for this project: a workstation (running Windows XP), an Android phone and a web-interface.

A Ruby on Rails server will be used for the web-interface already. After talking with one of my professors, he mentioned that we could actually use RoR to act as the application server by communicating through HTTP and XML. This would simply the development of the entire application since we could code the web-interface and the application server along side each other.

Our other option is something like JBoss or GlassFish (or is it? We really aren't experienced in this area). While we are comfortable creating Java clients, we haven't delved into something like JBoss/GlassFish in the slightest bit.

We're willing to spend the time to learn the technology, but we want to know which technology to use before we find out a month before it's due that we used the wrong application server.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance.

JBoss is incredibly easy to implement, as is Tomcat. We use both here at work for industry leading HR recruiting/hiring process/career management tools. They work equally well on Linux and Windows, but we tend to stick with Tomcat on Windows and JBoss on Linux. We have yet to run into any issues that weren't the fault of our own developers. Both of which you can just drop a war file into the apps directory and the server will automatically load it. They're also both free.

If I understand you correctly, it sounds like the best setup would be to write backend server application that does all the work, and then link into that via FastCGI.
But I haven't done much in this area so maybe I'm missing something, or misunderstood your project.

You have invested in RoR I would say stick with that.

Flying Fox wrote:

You have invested in RoR I would say stick with that.

Yeah, that was more or less my thought as well. Since you need to learn RoR anyway, it'll probably simplify things if you just use that for the functionality you need to add. RoR is designed for the sort of thing you're trying to do; why create extra work by learning yet another framework (and figuring out how to get it to talk to the existing RoR backend)?

Thanks for your input, guys. We are going to use the RoR solution.