Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
COMET with Apache and Jetty
Category: Comet
I had intended to marry the nice Apache2 event MPM and Jetty 6 with Continuations in order to achieve a thrifty, thread-sparing COMET capable Java app. The idea is that the Event MPM module in apache frees up a thread when an open connection to the browser is snoozing and Jetty frees up a thread when the backend servlet is snoozing. There are two problems, however.
- The Event MPM module seems to only snooze between requests. With COMET the need to snooze happens during a requests, i.e. we are expecting something to come back from the server.
- The request handler module — in this case mod_jk or mod_proxy_ajp — and not the Event MPM module handles the socket connections to the servlet container. From my reading of the most recent SVN branch, the modules are using blocking I/O and not polling.
It seems there’s still a bit of work to be done to make Apache and Jetty do the COMET dance.
There has been a lot of interest in COMET. Some people even prefer to see a world where the majority of Ajax apps are built using event-driven architectures including the network level. When will we have a simple way to do this on the server side? There are interesting vendors out there like Lightstreamer who are trying to feed into this market.
Related Content:
ShortBus will be a good solution for comet.
It’s an HTTP based event system using comet.
http://shortbus.xantus.org/
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