It’s like Ajax All Over Again

William Grosso @ August 15, 2006

When the term AJAX was first introduced, I was a bit confused. It sounded like something many of us had been doing for years. And yet, the term was introduced, people acted as if it was something new, and the buzz was huge.

After a while, I got over my confusion. AJAX really was just a good name for what we’d been doing. And having a good name for things is important.

Today, I finally got around to reading about Comet. Alex Russell, who’s doing amazing things these days, coined the term sometime in the past six months. As he put it:

An old web technology is slowly being resurrected from the depths of history. Browser features that have gone untouched for years are once again being employed to bring better responsiveness to UIs. Servers are learning to cope with a new way of doing things. And I’m not talking about Ajax.

New services like Jot Live and Meebo are built with a style of data transmission that is neither traditional nor Ajax. Their brand of low-latency data transfer to the browser is unique, and it is becoming ever-more common. Lacking a better term, I’ve taken to calling this style of event-driven, server-push data streaming “Comet”.

Good things: explicit acknowledgement that it’s an old trick, lots of dojo support for doing this, detailed slides from his ETech Talk, and generally excellent discussion of design choices.

Bad things: When I first ran across this idea, we called it “infinite length frames.” Googling now, I see that the terminology I learned has disappeared completely from the universe. That kind of disturbs me.

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