I've just received a request for an online backgammon game engine. It shouldn't be to hard to make as after all is essentially a chat program that moves pieces instead of showing text messages. I am basically a PHP developer but as I need event driven stuff (no pooling) I assume I could combine a java built core application and a Flash interface. Any suggestions to where should I look for some practical examples and maybe some advices?
Thanks
You can also build up the the Flash GUI with Adobe's Flex SDK. There are plenty of tutorials in the web for game developing with Flash/Flex. This, for example, is a useful site I found: Flash Game Development with Flex and ActionScript
For the Java backend you could use BlazeDS which provides highly scalable remote access and messaging.
BlazeDS uses two primary exchange patterns between server and client. In the first pattern, the request-response pattern, the client sends a request to the server to be processed. ... The second pattern is the publish-subscribe pattern where the server routes published messages to the set of clients that have subscribed to receive them.