I'm starting a team of 2 to develop a chat server (both of us are college students), we made some research and found that netty is the most suitable for this kind of concurrent based app.
we never had any experience in developing server side application in java, this is our first time to tackle this kind of project and I just need the right direction for us to build this server the right way.
Our goal is to build something like, whatsapp, kik messenger, Line or weChat.
The real question is, how to make our netty app scalable? do we need to use redis for data persistent? do we need to use mysql for saving relationship or nosql database like mongodb?
Hope someone could guide us.