Weiqi Gao's Observations - messaging tag

Kevin Nilson: Pushing Data To The Browser With Comet

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:40:08 GMT

Last night's presenter at the St. Louis Java Users Group is Kevin Nilson who gave a fascinating talk about Pushing Data to the Browser with Comet.

I came into the presentation not knowing what Comet is, exception what I heard on the internet. Kevin did a great job explaining what Comet is. The most valuable part of the presentation is the demonstrations Kevin did, which are fun and informative.

I'll let you read an article by Kevin himself to get the gist of what the subject matter is. I'll just show the words I wrote down during the talk:

Jetty
Pub/Sub
Bayeux
JASONp
script tag
XSS
Cometd
Long polling
Channel
Service channel
Meta channel
Server crash
Client auto-reconnect
JSON on the wire/HTTP

The background conversation at the JUG is also informative:

Is Scala for real? Kevin told us its the hottest thing at Silicon Valley. Mark and I still have some lingering doubts. Mark is focusing on something called persistent data structures. I'm more of a Luddite, fearing the years of learning that I have to go through to be proficient.
At the end of the session, when Brian went up the stage to run the Birthday Selector application to give away the goodies, Kevin Nilson mentioned the Wheel of Fortune application that Jim Weaver wrote for his JUG. Small world.
Ken Totton (of OCI, where I work) is still looking for top notch Java architects and developers. Send me an email at "weiqigao at speakeasy dot com" if you are interested. A couple of other places are also recruiting.
Brian asked a question about MigLayout. He's reading the OCI May Java News Brief on MigLayout. I gave him an meta-answer: "Just blog about how it doesn't work, and the MigLayout author will comment on your blog and show you the right answer."

Coming back to Cometd, I do have one reservation: It's another messaging protocol. This is the rare occasion when my Java duties intersect with my messaging protocol-watching duties. It reminds me something Paul says around the office: "You can always define a Pub/Sub protocol on top of a Request/Response protocol. And you can always define a Request/Response protocol on top of a Pub/Sub protocol."

That why this post will also be available under the title "Another JUG Meeting, Another Messaging Protocol". :)

Another Month, Another Messaging Stack Goes Open Source...

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:55:08 GMT

... for those keeping track, here are the previous ones:

And now (this is not new news, but Adam and Ciju haven't heard of it, and so) this:

Dionysios G. Synodinos for InfoQ: Adobe has announced plans to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification, which is designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between Adobe Flash Platform technologies. This move that has followed the opening of the AMF spec has been received with varying degrees of enthusiasm from the RIA community.

And it

encapsulated within HTTP requests to traverse firewalls.

Curious Development: Microsoft Joins...

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:24:11 GMT

... the AMQP Working Group.

(Via INfoQ.)

Microsoft Press Release, Oct. 24, 2008: Microsoft Corp. today announced that it is joining the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group...

Given that the goal of AMQP is to commodities message queuing products by standardizing on a wire protocol and a programming model, and that 29 months after the original announcement (as I reported 870 days ago) of the intent to publish AMQP 1.0 within 18 months, AMQP 1.0 hasn't been finalized, I believe this move by Microsoft, a proprietary messaging product vendor, means only one thing:

(I'm drawing a blank. Help me, internet!)...

This much is clear, with Microsoft in, IBM will have to join. And you know what results when Microsoft and IBM collaborate!