Guess what? Enough people are now using Ajax in sufficiently diverse ways to warrant declaring a
subset/corollary/complement of Ajax. Say hello to Comet!Comet, Alex Russell explains, is different from Ajax per se in the way messages are passed between the server and client. Instead of occasionally polling the server, Comet apps maintain an open line of communication with the server, whereby the server pushes data to the client.
The best-known example of Comet in action is Gmail's GTalk chat integration. Other, less widely known examples include the note-taking application JotSpot Live, and the web-based IRC client cgi:irc.
When will the trend of naming development techniques after cleaning supplies end? I've got an idea for the next one: Windex, a XML-based windowing environment! I have no idea what that means or how it would work, but in case anyone decides to take the idea and run with it, I'm declaring the term to be Some Rights Reserved! (See Web 2.0 glossary for info.)
1. Theres already something in existance you might call Windex, its called winlike... and way back in college I made something like it for my final project in web design tools.
Posted at 2:11AM on Apr 13th 2006 by Dave