Subject: [hybi] Starting points for HyBi

From: Kris Zyp <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:13:27 -0600

I am happy to see the formation of this group, and efforts taken
towards standardization in this area. Presumably HyBi isn't intending
to try to reinvent the wheel in this realm and ignore all prior art in
the area of asynchronous server-originated messaging over HTTP (aka
Comet, at least roughly). There is a significant amount of work that
has been done in designing, testing, and working towards interoperable
solutions for these capabilities. Therefore, I thought I would share
some resources so any subscribers that aren't familiar with the prior
work can have a good starting point:

Bayeux is probably the most widely used protocol for Comet-style HTTP
communication. It is built around the publish/subscribe paradigm, and
designed to be extensible and with transport negotiation capabilities.
http://svn.cometd.org/trunk/bayeux/bayeux.html
There is also an project called cometD for developing various
implementations of Bayeux, and there a number of Bayeux
implementations available now:
http://cometdproject.dojotoolkit.org/

While there is not a formal specification for it, REST Channels is
Comet-style protocol that is designed to provide notification of
changes to resources, with the intent of augmenting a REST
architecture with live data updates (obviously the Comet communication
isn't RESTful itself):
http://cometdaily.com/2008/09/02/rest-channels-http-channels-with-json-support/

Comet daily (http://cometdaily.com/) certainly isn't a normative
reference site, but it does contain a great deal of information and
discussion about some of the challenges and techniques of
cross-browser server-delivered messaging, that would be valuable
resources. This site also contains links to other efforts on protocols
in this area (the two mentioned certainly aren't the only ones).

Looking forward to further discussions on this mailing list!

Thanks,

- --
Kris Zyp
SitePen
(503) 806-1841
http://sitepen.com

- --
Kris Zyp
SitePen
(503) 806-1841
http://sitepen.com