Alex coins Comet: low latency data to Ajax apps

Alex Russell gave an excellent talk today at ETech on how to do server push in Ajax applications. The most widespread example of this in a product is GTalk inside of GMail. If you’ve used it you know how fast this can be for pushing data.

Alex recommends what he calls the Forever Frame approach. You basically use existing browser behaviors in order to keep pushing events to the client. His slides are available at his slight and there are some excellent diagrams to explain what he’s talking about, which we can now all refer to as “Comet”

He also runs through what we need to do on the server side in order to handle this type of interaction. As usual Alex is ahead of the curve.

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