Ajax Girl

When Comet was first coined there was a lot of buzz, and many thought that polling was dead. It turns out, that for certain use cases Comet is king, but it hasn’t spread as fast as some would have guessed (or liked). One core problem is that HTTP as we currently do it is braindead easy and commodity. Comet hasn’t been, although there are now more and more containers that grok it first hand.

Joe Walker has a nice editorial on the new Comet Daily on Why Comet is of growing importance.

Years of research gave him the following, highly technical, graph:

This does make some sense. It also makes sense that an event driven world is a nice one to play in. The question is how fast are people going to move in that direction, and how many applications really need it (you could say the same for offline and any other technology). If you can get away with polling, even if it isn’t efficient, eh.

There will always be the need for large companies and huge applications to use Comet, and this number will grow in size. Seeing what Google Chat has to do in the browser is a scary thing, and we need to make it just as easy to do the right thing, as we now allow polling.

More from the new Comet Daily

• Comet is always better than polling
• PubSub and Topics
• HTTP Streaming and Internet Explorer
• Educating Comet!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/181202265/comet-is-its-time-coming