My friend Kevin Nilson from SV-Web-JUG recently moderated a rather interesting talk on the Next Wave of Comet - what some like to call Reverse AJAX.
Kevin is an avid speaker on Comet, having even given a talk on Comet at San Francisco Java User Group, that I help organize.
Anyway, this talk not only discussed the present and the future for Comet, but also HTML5 and other next-generation web technologies.
Panelists included:
Alex Russell, Google Engine & Past President of the Dojo Foundation.
Michael Carter, Founder at Orbited Project & Official Contributor for W3C HTML5
Ted Goddard, Senior Software Architect at ICEsoft Technologies and ICEfaces.org
Greg Wilkins, Lead Developer of the Jetty
Dylan Schiemann, co-founder of Dojo Toolkit and CEO of SitePen.
Check out the full-featured video from the event:
A little bit about what they discussed...
What is Comet
AJAX became popular because it allowed the browser to make additional requests to web servers to update a page. One major limitation of AJAX is that the browser must initiate the request for data. Comet on the other hand allows the web server to push data to the browser at any time.
What is WebSocket
The HTML5 WebSocket standard defines the future of networking for browser applications, delivering full-duplex, bidirectional text-based communication between browsers and WebSocket servers. The WebSocket connection handshake leverages the HTTP standard to integrate with existing Web infrastructure, such as proxies, firewalls and load balancers, and then upgrades the wire protocol to remove the limitations of the HTTP request-response communication model. With WebSockets, browsers will be able to participate as first-class citizens in networked applications that are typically reserved for desktop clients, such as XMPP (Jabber) chat applications, as well as online gaming and financial trading applications.