Comet: Reverse Ajax for streaming data from the server

Daniel Rubio (who maintains the blogs section for TSS.com) has written an article called “Comet: Reverse Ajax for streaming data from the server,” describing ‘Comet,’ a technology to push events from the server side to a browser client. Comet manages to avoid the issues related to having a browser poll a server to check for new events.

The first thing you need to realize is that the data service on the serverside needs to be designed to hold state on behalf of browsers clients, a process that can either be very difficult or very easy, depending on the platform and language you are using. Once again, this takes us to the stateless nature of Web applications and the way a browser needs to identify itself constantly either via cookies or session IDs, or what some characterize as the Hollywood principle – “don’t call us we’ll call you” – referring that only a browser is equipped to make calls and never vice-versa.

This last issue takes us down the road of building an asynchronous server application, or if you prefer a fancier name, an HTTP-based event routing bus, or in other words, a latent application on the serverside able to keep track of clients wishing to receive updates, a design very much in line with the messaging systems used in enterprise systems that are based on publish/subscribe channels.

However, since this last mechanism represents a departure from the “bread and butter” approach used in most Web platforms, it is a big reason why most Comet applications today rely on either custom adapted application-servers or embeddable versions that can tackle these issues. In the particular case of Java, Jetty and Grizzly are two servers that currently have out-of-the box support for Comet-type designs, with varying support in other languages like Python and other popular Java servers like Tomcat, for what is technically known as “continuation support,” a paradigm by which applications are shielded from the stateless nature of the Web. Continuation support also is a touted feature of higher-level language Web frameworks written in Smalltalk and Lisp that have this capability.

Turning our attention to the client side of things, a browser can take various routes to stay in contact with these type of server applications. Among these approaches are long-polling, dynamic script tags and inclusively a workaround using IFrames, none are standard approaches by any means, which is yet another reason why many client side Comet designs rely on the use of frameworks to abstract away incompatibilities between browser implementations – similar to Ajax – with one such framework being Dojo, which in itself now serves as both an Ajax/Comet framework.

Of course, the term Comet itself is something to wonder about. AJAX’ meaning is fairly well-known, as “Asynchronous Javascript and XML,” but what about Comet?

As far as the actual term is concerned, Comet emerged as a pun to Ajax’s meaning outside IT circles as a household cleaner. But quirky name or not, Comet is serving the purpose of an umbrella name for delivering data onto browsers as it becomes available on the serverside, a technique that will surely be of the same impact and go hand in hand with what we know today as Ajax. (theserverside)