Simon Willison’s Weblog

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57 items tagged “comet”

2011

Why does Facebook chat use subdomains so aggressively?

Probably because it involves long-running connections. Browsers have a limit on the number of connections you can have open to the same domain at the same time (I think it’s 8 in most browsers these days). If Facebook chat opened a connection to www.facebook.com and you opened up 8 Facebook windows you would no longer be able to navigate to any more Facebook pages, since all 8 connections would be taken up by the long lived chat connections. By connecting to a different subdomain for each connection this problem can be avoided.

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2010

What is the history of Django? I’ve been playing with Quora—it’s a really neat twist on the question-and-answer format, which makes great use of friends, followers and topics and has some very neat live update stuff going on (using Comet on top of Tornado). I just posted quite a long answer to a question about the history of Django. # 24th August 2010, 5:31 pm

Hookbox (via) For most web projects, I believe implementing any real-time comet features on a separate stack from the rest of the application makes sense—keep using Rails, Django or PHP for the bulk of the application logic, and offload any WebSocket or Comet requests to a separate stack built on top of something like Node.js, Twisted, EventMachine or Jetty. Hookbox is the best example of that philosophy I’ve yet seen—it’s a Comet server that makes WebHook requests back to your regular application stack to check if a user has permission to publish or subscribe to a given channel. “The key insight is that all application development with hookbox happens either in JavaScript or in the native language of the web application itself”. # 29th July 2010, 9:48 am

App Engine at Google I/O 2010. OpenID and OAuth are now baked in to the AppEngine users API. They’re also demoing two very exciting new features—a mapper API for doing map/reduce style queries against the data store, and a Channel API for building comet applications. # 20th May 2010, 3:30 pm

Realtime Election Tweets. Jay Caines-Gooby’s realtime election tweet service, using Node.js, nginx and WebSocket with a Flash fallback. # 6th May 2010, 9:20 pm

Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas. # 8th February 2010, 11:21 am

Comet (long polling) for all browsers using ScriptCommunicator. More Comet from the Plurk team: 80 lines of dependency free JavaScript implementing long polling using script tags (hence working cross-domain) across IE6+, Firefox, WebKit and Opera. The clever bit is the code to detect loading errors. It doesn’t try to fix the infinite loading indicator problem—is that still a cromulent usability concern? # 3rd February 2010, 12:37 am

Plurk: Instant conversations using Comet (via) Plurk’s comet implementation sounds pretty amazing. They’re using a single quad-core server with 32GB of RAM running 8 Node.js instances to serve long-polled comet to 100,000+ simultaneous users. They switched to Node from Java JBoss/Netty and found the new solution used 10 times less memory. # 1st February 2010, 10:13 am

2009

Web Sockets in Tornado. Bret Taylor has a simple class making it trivial to experiment with the Web Sockets protocol (now shipping in Chrome) using the scalable Tornado application server. He also raises the million dollar question: what will existing load balancers and proxies make of the new protocol? # 31st December 2009, 11:54 am

Real time online activity monitor example with node.js and WebSocket. A neat exploration of Node.js—first hooking a “tail -f” process up to an HTTP push stream, then combining that with HTML 5 WebSockets to achieve reliable streaming. # 8th December 2009, 11:07 pm

Node.js is genuinely exciting

I gave a talk on Friday at Full Frontal, a new one day JavaScript conference in my home town of Brighton. I ended up throwing away my intended topic (JSONP, APIs and cross-domain security) three days before the event in favour of a technology which first crossed my radar less than two weeks ago.

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SPDY: The Web, Only Faster. Alex Russell explains the benefits of Google’s SPDF proposal (a protocol that upgrades HTTP)—including header compression, multiplexing, the ability to send additional resources such as images and stylesheets down without needing the data:uri hack and Comet support built in to the core assumptions of the protocol. # 13th November 2009, 1 pm

nginx_http_push_module. More clever design with webhooks—here’s an nginx module that provides a comet endpoint URL which will hang until a back end process POSTs to another URL on the same server. This makes it much easier to build asynchronous comet apps using regular synchronous web frameworks such as Django, PHP and Rails. # 17th October 2009, 4:48 pm

Diesel. Yet Another Asynchronous Python Comet Library, of interest because this is the first one I’ve seen that uses Python’s generator coroutines, taking advantage of the return value of the yield statement to feed messages in to a generator function. Currently only works on Python 2.6 on Linux due to a dependency on 2.6’s epoll support. # 23rd September 2009, 5:15 pm

Tornado Web Server (via) An extremely exciting addition to the Python web landscape, Tornado is the open sourced version of FriendFeed’s custom web stack. It’s a non-blocking (epoll) Python web server designed for handling thousands of simultaneous connections, perfect for building Comet applications. The web framework is cosmetically similar to web.py or App Engine’s webapp but has decorators for writing asynchronous request handlers. The template language uses Django-style syntax but allows you to use full Python expressions. FriendFeed have benchmarked it handling 8,000 requests a second running as four load-balanced processes on a 4 core server. # 10th September 2009, 9:32 pm

svnpubsub.py (via) A Twisted/Python powered comet API for pushing out Subversion commits, built for Apache Foundation projects. # 6th September 2009, 9:50 pm

EtherPad. Outstanding implementation of an online real-time collaborative text editor—basically SubEthaEdit in your browser. I can see myself using this a lot. # 24th July 2009, 12:35 am

Webhooks behind the firewall with Reverse HTTP. Hookout is a Ruby / rack adapter that lets you serve a web application from behind a firewall, by binding to a Reverse HTTP proxy running on the internet (such as the free one provided by reversehttp.net). Useful for far more than just webhooks, this means you can easily expose any Ruby web service to the outside world. An implementation of this as a general purpose proxy server would make it useful for applications written in any language. # 22nd July 2009, 1:46 pm

Reverse HTTP Demo (via) This is a bit of a brain teaser—a web server running in JavaScript in your browser which uses long polling comet to respond to incoming HTTP requests channelled through a “Reverse HTTP” proxy. # 21st July 2009, 3:54 pm

Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step. Paul promotes gzip encoding using nginx as a proxy, and mentions that FriendFeed use a “custom, epoll-based python server” as their application server. Does that mean that they’re serving their real-time comet feeds directly from Python? # 17th April 2009, 5:19 pm

Visualising Radio, pushing, not pulling. The BBC’s new radio player uses Comet over a Flash XMLsocket connection transport, with an ActiveMQ message queue behind the scenes. I’d like to know what server they’re using to broadcast out to the XMLsocket connections. # 13th January 2009, 12:59 am

2008

ptth (Reverse HTTP) implementation in a browser using Long Poll COMET. Donovan Preston experiments with the cleverly named idea of ptth, where servers send HTTP requests to clients. # 8th December 2008, 5:22 pm

FriendFeed launch a real-time API. This is huge: JSONP plus long polling Comet, with “everything since X” tokens to ensure you don’t miss anything. This is the first open Comet API I’ve seen anywhere. Combine this with FriendFeed’s regular API (which allows arbitrary message posting) and you’ve got a really powerful tool for hackers who want to experiment with Comet without rigging up their own infrastructure. # 22nd October 2008, 2:18 pm

A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1. Richard Jones explores Mochiweb, Erlang and linux kernel tuning for building a high performance comet server. Does this mean real-time web features are coming to last.fm? # 16th October 2008, 2:16 pm

Private Messages with cometD Chat. cometd-java (a Java servlet reference implementation of the Bayeux protocol) can be extended with BayeuxService subclasses that run within the server itself. # 16th October 2008, 2:14 pm

View your FriendFeed in real-time. FriendFeed become the latest site to enable real-time updates using the long-polling variant of Comet. The real-time Web was something of a theme at this year’s FOWA, with talks on message queues, XMPP and scaling Comet at Meebo. # 16th October 2008, 2:06 pm

Spawning + Django. The latest version of Spawning (a fast Python web server built on top of the Eventlet non-blocking coroutine networking library) can run Django applications out of the box, using threads and processes to work around the blocking nature of the ORM’s database drivers. Eric Florenzano reports better performance than Apache and mod_wsgi, and is now hosting his site on it. # 31st July 2008, 10:56 am

How Comet Brings Instant Messaging to meebo. “What started off as a hack appears to be fulfilling one of the most basic needs of the Web, which is live synchronous interaction”—Jian Shen # 27th July 2008, 11:18 am

Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap. # 4th July 2008, 9:54 am

Enough Already with the Connections! Comet doesn’t mean making long-lived HTTP connections (which most browsers do anyway thanks to HTTP keep-alive), it means making long-held HTTP requests. I’m guilty of spreading this misinformation in the past. # 30th June 2008, 9:27 am