57 items tagged “comet”
2008
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.
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.
Google Finance Comet. Google Finance now shows live stock quotes, updated by Comet.
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.
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.
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.
Comet at the Highland Fling. I thoroughly enjoyed the Highland Fling yesterday. Here are the slides from my talk on Comet.
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.
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.
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.
Let me be again clear here that Comet isn’t a new single technique. Rather, it’s a combination of existing push technologies with further research into new methods that together provides a robust framework for pushing data to all clients on modern networks.
django-evserver. Marek Majkowski got Comet working with Django using a custom WSGI server that wraps libevent using ctypes.
$.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.
Why we switched to Jetty. Zimbra (recently acquired by Yahoo!) are using Jetty for Comet. It sounds like they are using Bayeux as well.
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.
2007
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.
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.
JavaScript Internationalisation, explained by reindeer. “Santa even spooked Comet recently by talking about him as if he were some pushy web server.”
Comet works, and it’s easier than you think
I gave a talk this morning at the Yahoo! Web Developer Summit on Comet, cometd and Bayeux.
[... 1,314 words]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.
Jetty WebServer. Jetty 6.1 was the only cometd / Bayeux implementation I tried which worked out of the box.
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).
IE ActiveX(“htmlfile”) Transport, Part II. Fascinating tricks for working around IE memory leaks using explicit CollectGarbage() calls and setInterval() to an empty function.
Ten New Things in WebKit 3. Does “incremental updates for persistent server connections” for XMLHttpRequest mean Safari now has native support for Comet?
Orbited: The Orbit Event Daemon. HTTP daemon designed for long-lasting comet connections, written in Python using pyevent on top of libevent.
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.
2006
Bayeux. Comet might just make Java relevant for web development again.