Comet

In web development, Comet is a neologism to describe a web application model in which a long-held HTTP request allows a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it. Comet is an umbrella term for multiple techniques for achieving this interaction. All these methods rely on features included by default in browsers, such as JavaScript, rather than on non-default plugins. In theory, the Comet approach differs fr... more

In web development, Comet is a neologism to describe a web application model in which a long-held HTTP request allows a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it. Comet is an umbrella term for multiple techniques for achieving this interaction. All these methods rely on features included by default in browsers, such as JavaScript, rather than on non-default plugins. In theory, the Comet approach differs from the original model of the web, in which a browser requests a complete web page or chunks of data to update a web page. However in practice, Comet applications typically use Ajax with long polling to detect new information on the server. The concept predates the coining of the neologism, and is known by several other names, including Ajax Push, Reverse Ajax, Two-way-web, HTTP Streaming and HTTP server push among others. Comet is an umbrella term for technologies that attempt to eliminate both the limitations of the page-by-page web model and... less