Topic: Comet in the real world?

Hello all. I see the benefits of comet - in theory. I see the approach requires a dedicated threading model
on the server end - and lowers performances on the server side.

That's quite a high price to pay for a set of tricks that I have yet to see correctly applied.

Hence the question : anyone has a comet link likely to impress me at hands?

I'm not saying I have anything but what are you looking for? What kind of application would impress you?

It's just that I'm not too sure how exciting you can make data streaming The impressive bit would probably be the quite irrelevant representation layer.

I'm not sure about Comet, it seems like another new name for something that has existed for years.

Please correct if I'm wrong (I probably am) but Comet just seems to me to be AJAX but with a timer set on the server side to push data to the client, now surely AJAX is still used here to check for changes in the data source, so this has been around for years hasn't it...

As far as examples to show I can't think of one, I assume in-browser chat clients would work well like Meebo, but they rely on having one connection open per client so you'll need the hardware to handle such a service. It all seems pretty niche to me.

Yeah, my feelings exactly : I understand it allows direct event handling from the client to the server,
and is an interesting "track", I see potential applications, but that's it - the examples I have seen are terrible.

Comet daily has articles and resources about Comet.

Server Sent Event are sub optimal ( only one type of event, only plain text payload ) but they work well enough. Comet allows for very low latency response and voids the need for blind polling. The drawback being that it's difficult to put in place on a shared host. But if you can keep threads running on the server, using Python, Java, Pike, Erlang ... it works a great deal.

Comet is basically a requirement for any kind of chat application or semi-realtime multi-user application ( games anyone ).