Slightly ajar

While surfing around the web, I bumped into Simon Willison's latest blog post on a new buzz word technique called Comet. For those of you that are not familiar with this, the Comet site gives this explanation:

Comet is a set of techniques providing low-latency data transit for the browser. The two most popular techniques, “forever-frame” and “long-polling”, significantly reduce latency over Ajax polling. Comet in the browsers typically requires a web server optimized for large numbers of long-lived HTTP connections, and a JavaScript client to communicate with the Comet server. A number of open source and commercial options exist today.

Simon explains that this is an alternative to Ajax polling and saves wasted requests. I'm not expert on Ajax, or Comet, or HTML5, but this sounds very much like the same concept as Server Sent Events from HTML5, which Opera added support for some time ago. You can play around with this by going to the demo on the Opera Web apps blog. If this is the case, then it may be interesting to create a solution where the native SSE functionality is used if supported (Opera) or use a library if not. I'd love to see some developers play around with it and give their feedback.