Reverse Ajax without Comet?

Question

Is it possible to let the web server send a message to the web browser without Comet?

Every major web company like Facebook and Google uses Comet for this purpose and it just seems like an ugly hack waiting to disappear if tcp connections were enabled for major browsers.

Answer 1

Is it possible to let the web server send a message to the web browser without Comet?

Yes, its possible via Silverlight, Flex, Flash and Java Applets.

Every major web company like Facebook and Google uses Comet for this purpose and it just seems like an ugly hack waiting to disappear if tcp connections were enabled for major browsers.

TCP connections a la HTML 5 Web Sockets won't solve the problem. You see a lot of people use Google and Facebook from their workplace, university or school and firewalls often block non-standard ports, and non-HTTP traffic. So a solution which sends messages to a web browser has to work over HTTP and often look like HTTP. That's why Google and Facebook use Comet and will continue to do so otherwise they won't be able to reach a large percentage of their users. In fact, some firewalls and reverse proxies will close long-running HTTP connections and so an Ajax polling connection is often used as a fallback. I can suggest something like StreamHub Reverse Ajax if you are looking for a server that is capable of sending messages to the browser via Reverse Ajax.