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We built the website using Apache Tomcat and MySQL on a Linux machine. We found JSP's and Servlets extremely easy to create and use, which made development go pretty quickly. We found the JSP's to be best suited for serving out the pages with lots of HTML and only used Servlets for Beans and handling asynchronous requests. Interface behavior was done with a lot of CSS and Javascript, relying heavily on AJAX to avoid frequent page refreshes. Most of the Javascript was home-brew, but we did use JQuery-ui for its autocomplete functionality. The only problem with the implementation was that we could never get Database Connection Pooling working properly with Servlets, which caused the website to occasionally (once a day or so) lose the ability to query the database until restarted. Obviously, this is a huge issue from a website usability standpoint, but since it didn't directly impact the interface (and since this is a user interface class), we decided not to pursue a bug fix. For the most part, we had no problems with the systems used in our implementation; the only issue was that we were building everything ourselves, which took a lot of time.
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