There are a couple of solutions available to use a STOMP client. STOMP is incredibly simple and lightweight, perfect for the iPhone. I used this one as my starting point, and found it very good. It has a few object allocation/memory leak problems, but once I got the hang of iPhone programming, these were easy … Read more
I’d take a look at evserver (http://code.google.com/p/evserver/) if all you need is comet. It “supports [the] little known Asynchronous WSGI extension” and is build around libevent. Works like a charm and supports django. The actual handler code is a bit ugly, but it scales well as it really is async io. I have used evserver … Read more
After digging for a day and a night in the guts of the internets, here is what I came up with: server-sent events – Very cool, currently works only in Opera, but may be part of HTML5 and other browsers may support it sometime. Adds a new element tag with content-type of “application/x-dom-event-stream” which allows … Read more
Just for the sake of argument. Both are http request (xhr), and its at least partially untrue it uses more server resources (depends totally on technology, will explain later). Short polling. Lot of request that are processed as they come on server. Creates a lot of traffic (uses resources, but frees them as soon as … Read more
1) Why is the WebSockets protocol better? WebSockets is better for situations that involve low-latency communication especially for low latency for client to server messages. For server to client data you can get fairly low latency using long-held connections and chunked transfer. However, this doesn’t help with client to server latency which requires a new … Read more
Comet is challenging to scale with IIS because of comet’s persistent connectivity, but there is a team looking at Comet scenarios now. Also look at Aaron Lerch’s blog as I believe he’s done some early Comet work in ASP.NET.
Yes, what you’re looking for is COMET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming). Other good Google terms to search for are AJAX-push and reverse-ajax.
I wrote the plugin mentioned by Till. The plugin is an implementation of the Bayeux protocol and currently supports long-polling (local server via AJAX) and callback-polling (remote server via XSS). There is a Bayeux implementation for Python called cometd-twisted that I have heard my plugin works with, but I have not verified this. I have … Read more
The way Facebook does this is pretty interesting. A common method of doing such notifications is to poll a script on the server (using AJAX) on a given interval (perhaps every few seconds), to check if something has happened. However, this can be pretty network intensive, and you often make pointless requests, because nothing has … Read more
Agreeing/expanding what has already been said, I don’t think FastCGI will solve the problem. Apache Each request into Apache will use one worker thread until the request completes, which may be a long time for COMET requests. This article on Ajaxian mentions using COMET on Apache, and that it is difficult. The problem isn’t specific … Read more