HTML 5 Websockets will replace Comet?

Question

It looks like Websockets in HTML 5 will become a new standard for server push.

Does that mean the server push hack called Comet will be obsolete?

Is there a reas

Answer 1

Charter for the [working group] working group tasked with websockets, BiDirectional or Server-Initiated HTTP (hybi):

Description of Working Group

HTTP has most often been used as a request/response protocol, leading to clients polling for new data, or users hitting the refresh button in their browsers. Recent web applications are finding ways to communicate with web servers in realtime, pushing data from the server-side to the client as soon as it is available. However, these applications at present can only use a variety of HTTP mechanisms (e.g. long polling requests) to communicate with web servers bidirectionally.

The Hypertext-Bidirectional (HyBi) working group will seek standardization of one approach to maintain bidirectional communications between the HTTP client, server and intermediate entities, which will provide more efficiency compared to the current use of hanging requests.

HTTP still has a role to play; it's a flexible message oriented system. websockets was developed to provide bidirectionality and avoid the long polling issue altogether. [it does this well]. but it's simpler than http. and there's a lot of things that are useful about http. there will certainly be continued progress enriching http's bidirectional communication, be it comet or other push technologies. my own humble attempt is [http://github.com/rektide/pipe-layer].