Simon Willison’s Weblog

Comet (programming) on Wikipedia on 4th June 2008 (via) The last useful version (which I had pointed many people to) before it was gutted down to just a couple of paragraphs by infuriating deletionists. # 16th June 2008, 9:34 am

Saturday Mornings: Going Live! Some 1980s/1990s British nostalgia. I pinched a video of the theme tune from here for my talk on Comet at Brighton SkillSwap. # 12th June 2008, 12:14 am

Google Finance Comet. Google Finance now shows live stock quotes, updated by Comet. # 4th June 2008, 8:36 am

On-board vs. Off-board Comet. Useful distinction. On-board comet runs on the same server as the rest of your application; Off-board comet is served from a separate server (generally a subdomain) and a separate stack. If you want to stick with PHP, Rails or Django for the rest of your site off-board comet looks like the way to go. # 22nd May 2008, 5:02 pm

Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark launch” period where live pages simulated chat request traffic without showing any visible UI. # 15th May 2008, 7:55 am

Persevere adds Comet Support. Persevere sounds neat: a RESTful HTTP/JSON data store (the interface reminds me of CouchDB) which recently gained the ability to “subscribe” to a resource and receive notifications of updates via comet. # 13th May 2008, 8:09 am

Comet at the Highland Fling. I thoroughly enjoyed the Highland Fling yesterday. Here are the slides from my talk on Comet. # 4th April 2008, 10:13 am

A Toy Chat Server with Eventlet and Mulib (via) Eventlet (the Python non-blocking IO library originally written for Second Life) is ideally suited to building Comet servers; Chuck Thier demonstrates a simple chat server in a small amount of code. # 21st March 2008, 3:28 am

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier. # 5th March 2008, 6:28 pm

Gears 0.2 Released! New modules are HttpRequest and Timer, both for use within workers (which provide Erlang-style message passing concurrency). Particularly interesting is that the Gears HttpRequest module can be used for much cleaner Comet implementations in IE. # 5th March 2008, 12:21 am

django-evserver. Marek Majkowski got Comet working with Django using a custom WSGI server that wraps libevent using ctypes. # 19th January 2008, 12:15 pm

$.comet (via) The first Comet (with Bayeux) plugin I’ve seen for jQuery—currently only handles long-polling over XMLHttpRequest, but still a promising start. # 9th January 2008, 8:31 am

Why we switched to Jetty. Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo!) are using Jetty for Comet. It sounds like they are using Bayeux as well. # 8th January 2008, 5:12 am

20,000 Reasons Why Comet Scales. Greg Wilkins coaxes Jetty and Bayeux in to supporting 20,000 simultaneous users per server while maintaining sub-second latency, using Amazon EC2 to run the benchmark. # 7th January 2008, 8:32 am

Django and Comet. How to build a chat application using Django and the Orbited comet server. Orbited can be set up to proxy most requests through to a Django backend while handling any comet requests itself. # 26th December 2007, 9:05 pm

The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today. Absolutely the best summary I’ve seen of all of the current Comet techniques in one place. # 11th December 2007, 1:13 pm

JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.” # 8th December 2007, 2:04 pm

Call for Participation for XTech 2008. XTech 2008 will be in Dublin, Ireland from the 6th to the 9th of May. Lots of really interesting topics in the CfP (OpenID, OAuth, Comet, CouchDB...)—deadline for submissions is the 25th of January. # 5th December 2007, 3:28 pm

Jetty WebServer. Jetty 6.1 was the only cometd / Bayeux implementation I tried which worked out of the box. # 27th November 2007, 6:43 pm

A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet. Kris Zyp describes a conceptual model for Comet messages based on REST semantics (so you can send a PUT referencing a specific URI down to a client to represent an idempotent state change). # 21st November 2007, 8:18 pm

IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function. # 19th November 2007, 11:48 am

Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet? # 16th November 2007, 1:19 am

Orbited: The Orbit Event Daemon. HTTP daemon designed for long-lasting comet connections, written in Python using pyevent on top of libevent. # 9th November 2007, 11:01 pm

Comet Daily. New regularly updated site covering Comet, the Ajax-like umbrella term for JavaScript server-push techniques. Already a bunch of great stuff on there. # 7th November 2007, 10:53 am

Bayeux. Comet might just make Java relevant for web development again. # 7th August 2006, 11:51 am