"Pushing" the web
September 6th, 2008
So Recently I've been delving into the marvelous world of Pushing data to web browsers.Ok, before I get flamed, what I mean by pushing (for now) is the browser requesting data and the server sending new events periodically as they happen. Other technologies in this area are things like Comet and Orbited. Many people are already using various methods to implement this, services such as Mibbit, GMail/GDocs, Facebook, Highrise and others.
While this isn't a discussion about why I didn't use the existing approaches, I will say some of them are because the servers are based on Java or Twisted (python), which is bulky and I felt it could be simplified.
For now the general thought process is that the clients web browser requests data from the server via AJAX or JSONP, Flash or an IFrame, and when the server has some data to send, it plops it out, the web browser reads it and everyone is happy...
Limitations of these methods...
