Another massively important geek tool

[elfs]

Along with Pound and Merb, I found another very important geek toy this weekend: Juggernaut. Juggernaut is going to absolutely change the way the web works, and it's going to do it frigteningly fast. Because Juggernaut destroys the one major complaint we developers have about the web: it's statelessness.

Juggernaut creates a little javascript applet (not java, javascript) on the browser with a permanent TCP/IP connection to the server. Through this connection, it is possible for the server to send events to the client without being polled.

If you have no idea how important that is, don't worry about it. To those of us for whom time-critical events are just that, critical, it makes all the difference. Now, instead of constantly harassing the server and being out-of-date within seconds of the poll, you get real-time data from the server when the server thinks it's significant. It pulls the web into the 20th century: no more busy-waiting, no more collate-without-effect.

Now if only I had something that had a use for it.

Comments

[mundens.livejournal.com]

Um, this isn't really new, and last time the equivalent came around with what were called "push technologies" it failed miserably. There just wasn't any real point.

Also, it puts a additional load on the server and makes server farming and fail-over impossible.