Comet with node.js and V8

slideshare.net

16 points·ntoshev··7 comments

With WebSockets right around the corner, is there any reason to care about Comet anymore? (Of course, node.js can also be used with WS, which is what I plan on doing.)

I think you have misunderstood something. Comet is a general way of pushing back events as they happen and there are different ways of implementing comet, two of these ways are using long poll and using WebSockets...

Why you should care about comet? Because it is the future of web applications. Look at Google Wave, Facebook Chat or Google Documents - - they use comet to create realtime web applications. I predict that most web-applications will use this technology as most sites today use Ajax in some form.

Also note the point of entry into building a scaleable comet application is getting much lower with such tools like node.js, erlycomet and JBoss Netty.

I guess I associate Comet solely with long-polling. Don't disagree at all re: the future of web apps; the reason why WebSockets are exciting is that real-time communication is becoming a first-class citizen in the browser, rather than an (admittedly cool) hack.

Internet Explorer is a reason for some of us to care.

Ah, true. However, non-standard browsers can theoretically be supported by passing through a Flash plug-in: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

I suppose the ideal scenario is a backend which is capable of supporting both Comet and WS, depending on the browser capabilities.

Something's wrong with the node.js vs Tornado benchmark: "total transfered" byte count is more than 2x bigger for Tornado. This should be headers as "HTML transfered" is about the same.

Node.js + V8 = awesome!

Comet not so

Reply on news.ycombinator.com