Java Developer Conference 2010

Emerging Ajax techniques called Ajax Push or Comet have brought revolutionary changes to Web application interactivity and have moved the Web into the Participation Age. Traditional Ajax can be used to allow the browser to request information from the server in asynchronous fashion, but does not allow a server to push updates to a browser. Comet solves this problem. Comet is a technology that enables web clients and web servers to communicate fully asynchronously, allowing real-time operations and functions previously unheard of with traditional web applications. Today writing portable Web applications that can use the power of the Comet technique is almost impossible: Tomcat, Jetty, and Grizzly/GlassFish™ application server all have their own set of private APIs. Atmosphere makes it easier to write portable Comet based applications. Atmosphere is a high-level API designed to make it easier to build Comet-based Web applications that include a mix of Comet and RESTful behavior.

This session will start to provide an brief introduction to the asynchronous web, AJAX polling, long polling, and Streaming, explaining the Bayeux protocol, Cometd, Grizzly Comet and Atmosphere. Atmosphere leverages and builds on Project Jersey and the Java™ API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). Different approaches and best practices to develop comet application will be discussed. We will also demonstrate how to develop a simple chat application, a distance learning slideshow application, how to manage a chat application from the server a Twitter-like application and a two-player distributed game application. Attendees will take away the tactics they need in order to add multi-user collaboration, notification and other Comet features to their application, whether they develop with Dojo, jQuery, jMaki, or Prototype and whether they deploy on Jetty, Tomcat, or the GlassFish Application Server.

Speaker: Sang Shin