Pushing Data to the Browser with Comet

(Kevin Nilson) AJAX has become so popular because it allows a browser to initiate a request to the server to receive or push data. Pushing data from the server to a client at an undetermined interval has been a problem that AJAX has never been able to deal with well. Simple examples of applications that AJAX does not handle well due to the need for server push are chat applications, live temperature updates, tailing log files, and calling long running queries. Comet can solve this problem. Comet is a web application architecture that allows a web server to send data to a browser without any need for the browser to request the data. Three common examples of allowing a server to push data to a browser are: polling, long polling, and streaming. Long polling and streaming are two strategies that are considered Comet.