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Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser
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03/03/2006, By Alex Russell
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An old web technology is slowly being resurrected from the depths of history. Browser features that have gone untouched for years are once again being employed to bring better responsiveness to UIs. Servers are learning to cope with a new way of doing things. And I’m not talking about Ajax.
New services like Jot Live and Meebo are built with a style of data transmission that is neither traditional nor Ajax. Their brand of low-latency data transfer to the browser is unique, and it is becoming ever-more common. Lacking a better term, I’ve taken to calling this style of event-driven, server-push data streaming “Comet”. It doesn’t stand for anything, and I’m not sure that it should. There is much confusion about how these techniques work, and so using pre-existing definitions and names is as likely to get as much wrong as it would get right.
Defining Comet
For a new term to be useful, at a minimum we need some examples of the technology, a list of the problems being solved, and properties which distinguish it from other techniques. As with Ajax, these aren’t hard to find.
A short list of example applications includes:
GMail’s GTalk integration
Jot Live
Renkoo
cgi:irc
Meebo
 Read More...
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