Question

I haven’t delved much into comet programming, but it interests me and I want to try it out. I want to know which languages are good for implementing comet on the server side, and have good, stable libraries or frameworks for doing so. For the client I’ll either be using javascript, or if a particular language has a good framework whatever that framework uses.

Answer 1

I’m an incremental learning sort of a person, so when learing a new technique I prefer to work in a langauge I already know (and vice-versa, try and do something familiar in a new language), but, hey, sometimes we need a big bang …

You don’t say what langauges and programming models you already know. The essence of Comet is in three parts:

1. Some incremental generation of data over a period of time
2. a server capability to deliver that data over a long-duration connection
3. a client capability to request that data and read from the long-duration connection

Working backwards through those:

Client-side you probably are browser-based and so use JavaScript.

Server-side you would save a whole load of work if you can use a library to handle the delivery. There’s plenty of options, I work in Java and the App Server vendor provides suitable libraries. I see that there’s a PHP library so my guess is that suitable libraries are avaialble in may server-side langauges.

So focus on the data that you intend to deliver, what constraints are there here. In my case I’m delivering real-time old industry data which is available via some Java libraries, so it’s going to be Java. I’m confident I can program in Java and I’m confident that I can build robust solutions in that language.

Summary: decide on your constraints and preferences for a server-side language, and check that suitable Comet libraries exist.

Happy learning.