or you could not use general purpose web servers for edge cases, mochiweb for example is pretty great at handling comet requests.
axod does mibbit by himself, we(hypernumbers) use comet and are a small team, meebo used comet from the start.
there really isnt much of a barrier with comet, it was actually a hell of a lot easier than the flash sockets setup I implemented before it.
* probably worth mentioning facebook used mochiweb for their chat (off the shelf), I do find it hard to believe the only lightweight webservers around are in erlang
Wouldn't you say that any application thinking of using Comet would by definition be an edge case?
But yeah, I'd disagree that the barrier to Comet is low. The natural thing to compare it to is HTTP Polling, which has no barrier whatsoever beyond knowing about window.setInterval(); (is it correct to end a sentence containing code with a semicolon?:)
Twiddla went from concept to launch in ten hours, largely because I didn't need to spend any time thinking about how to handle communications. The intention was to replace Polling with Comet at some point in the future, but you know what? It just isn't anywhere near as slow or problematic as I was expecting.
Back to my original point, there are a lot of smart people (such as yourself) working on this problem. Before the year is out, I suspect that somebody will have a good, proven, out-of-the-box Comet server that you can simply drop your application onto. That's the day I'm waiting for.
heh the point of all 3 of my comments is that there is a good, proven, out-of-the-box* comet server. mochiweb, I havent tested but I would imagine iserve and yaws handle themselves similarly well.
* depending on your definition of out-of-the-box, mochiweb doesnt actually enforce any "protocol" for handling comet for you, those are application specific and reasonably trivial to code.
* I also forgot about erlycomet, which is built on mochiweb, and is a straight out of the box comet server
axod does mibbit by himself, we(hypernumbers) use comet and are a small team, meebo used comet from the start.
there really isnt much of a barrier with comet, it was actually a hell of a lot easier than the flash sockets setup I implemented before it.
* probably worth mentioning facebook used mochiweb for their chat (off the shelf), I do find it hard to believe the only lightweight webservers around are in erlang