title: Creation of a client-server desktop application
body: <p>I've in the past created client-server web applications using Javascript, AJAX, Node, Express and MongoDB, but now I'm required to creare a client-server desktop application. It will therefore basically consists of a desktop program which will connect to a server program by doing requests. The server program will respond to the client program with the requested data which it can fetch from the database.</p>
  
  <p>Since I'm really new to these kind of applications in Java, I have no idea how to create such an application in Java. Since the project will be large, we cannot hard-code all the server. We need probably a framework on the server side that listens for requests, but I've not found any for now. For example, Play Framework seems only to work for web applications. Which frameworks are useful for these purpose? Is this the right approach for this kind of applications? How would I connect client and server applications? </p>
  
  <p>Please, do not suggest "use sockets". This will be quite a big "serious" project, and we need high level tools. We don't know how usually these kind of projects are created. Please, explain a little bit which patterns are usually used. Examples of concrete programs, maybe with open source code will be useful for us to understand. Also a list of the requirements that we need for these project would be very useful.</p>
  
  <p><em>Note: I'm not asking for a exhaustive list of frameworks that we can use. I rather asking which kind of tools (with concrete examples) should we use and how to combine them. How to structure such a project.</em></p>