Hello Comet: Part 1
Comet is a web application model that enables web servers to send data to the client without having to explicitly request it. Comet is an umbrella term for multiple techniques for achieving this interaction. All these methods rely on features included by default in browsers, such as JavaScript. This approach allows developers create event-driven web applications without any non-default browser plugins.
In practice, Comet applications typically use Ajax with long polling to detect new information on the server. This concept is also known as Ajax Push, Reverse Ajax, HTTP streaming, etc.
In this article we will use Lightstreamer – web server for pushing live data to Rich Internet Applications. Lightstreamer can stream real-time data to any client – simple HTML form, Flash/Flex/Silverlight or even iPhone application. In first part of the article, we will setup and configure Lightstreamer for our demo. We will use Lightstream Moderato Free Edition which is quite adequate for our test application.
