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 Now, instead of constantly harassing the server and being out-of-date within seconds of the poll, you get real-time data from the server when the server thinks it's significant.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

[dossy.livejournal.com]

This isn't as life-changing as you make it out to be.

On the web, this was originally called HTTP Server Push by Netscape in 1995. It was also called HTTP Streaming.

Just like AJAX was available much earlier than when it's popularity took off, HTTP Server Push hasn't gotten much attention until recently, with folks calling it Comet. Between Netscape's original "server push" and the nascent "Comet", this design was referred to as Publish/Subscribe or "pub-sub".

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

That's exactly why this technique isn't "life changing." No one else has a really good use for it, either, yet.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

HTTP Push and Comet are both broken because they attempt to make HTTP do something it was never meant to do.

On the other hand, Juggernaut is not broken because it doesn't try to use HTTP; instead it uses an ordinary "blind" but always connected protocol, the Flash XML protocol, to send events to the browser. This protocol is similar to many familiar ones: POP, IMAP, NNTP, FTP-COMMAND.

Ever use IM? IRC? A Muck? How about a visually oriented muck? With high powered Ajax like EXTJS or Scriptaculous, a large number of event-driven things like games and chats can now be written directly into the browser, but they lack an event model; they all polled. Now, they don't have to.

I suspect this technique is either going to show up in the next rev of JS, or we'll be seeing the flash-based solution become standard sometime pretty soon.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Like a dancing cow, it's impressive that it works at all.

...Or, you could just write a custom app. In C. Like you're supposed to. Honestly, I don't understand this fetish for re-implementing an entire fricking operating system inside a Web browser. Yes, you could probably write 'fsck' in JavaScript to run inside Firefox, but why???

<curmudge, curmudge...>