Comet and Reverse Ajax: The Next-Generation Ajax 2.0

Chapter 3. Introducing Comet

In Chapter 2, you looked at polling and piggybacking techniques to see how far you could get with creating an interactive collaborative application. Along the way, you found yourself juggling timeout periods, responsiveness, and server/network loads, without reaching a satisfactory balance between the various factors.

Using Comet techniques, you can simplify matters. In this section, you're going to look at the basic building blocks of Comet and implement those building blocks from scratch yourself within a standard web application framework (Groovy on Grails). Along the way, you'll see how Comet can improve your applications' responsiveness, and you'll discover a whole new set of issues. The examples that we present ...