Thursday, 25 September 2008

Ajax Push via WebSocket for ICEfaces?

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ICEfaces currently uses XMLHttpRequest to implement Ajax Push, but will better networking capabilities be available in the future, such as WebSocket? Join us to discuss WebSocket, Ajax Push, and Comet at the Silicon Valley WebBuilder Panel on October 29, 2008.

The panel has a great lineup of people who don't always agree (this is a good thing for a panel):

ICEfaces and cometd take fairly different approaches to solving "push" on the web.

The cometd approach is to generalize messaging between JavaScript objects so that they can exchange arbitrary messages with each other (even if they're in different browsers). The server may act only as a reflector. In other words, JavaScript is regarded as first-class and messaging between distributed objects characterizes the application architecture.

The ICEfaces approach is to make Ajax fully asynchronous: with Ajax we can update the page incrementally (without a full page refresh); Ajax Push allows the application to issue incremental updates at any time, independently of user events. The result here is that the server is primary and JavaScript is used only to implement the page update mechanism. The standard Java web application architecture remains in force.

Will WebSocket help us implement such things? What about HTTP 1.1 pipelining for XMLHttpRequest? Please join us to find out.