Hm - fair point. If I was to do something like this, I'd definitely treat it as a throwaway - I'd do some cursory data modeling, put some tables into a local MySQL DB, reverse engineer that with (say) Hibernate and then throw some Jersey services and some Ajax in front of it. I wouldn't give any consideration to scalability, or security, or maintainability... one would hope that a hiring committee would take that into account, but you're probably right, the people doing the evaluating would likely immediately forget that this was supposed to be thrown together in a couple of hours, people being people as they tend to be.