I recently edited and reviewed author Thomas Powell’s last book, “The AJAX Complete Reference.” It is an excellent book and I am a bit partial to chapter 10, which outlines several of the Comet transports in use today. To complement the book, Thomas recently published a Website where you can find a free PDF version of chapter 10. In addition, to the chapter you will also find source code for all of the chapter examples.

The Web 2.0 Expo is coming to New York in September and, as luck would have it, I have been invited to speak at the event on the subject of Comet. The talk is entilted “Comet: Reversing the Web with Ajax 2.0″. Attendees will be introduced to the techniques and technologies behind Comet and will also get a first look at WebSockets–an emerging HTML 5 standard that is challenging the way we view Comet today. Should you be in the area please stop in!

Record sessions and slides from Google I/O can now be viewed here.

Among the sessions available is “Can We Get There From Here?”, presented by Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation. Overall, it is a well delivered and thought provoking talk, as well as a must see for any combatant of the browser wars over the based decade and a half. Nice work Alex!

Today, Kaazing announced its partnership with Sun Microsystems (View the PR release here). Kaazing will provide integration for its Enterprise Comet offering and Sun’s Glassfish Java EE container. The joint offering will make it possible for Glassfish developers to build scalable, production ready Comet applications. Combine the joint offering with JSR-1, and you have a low-cost, low-latency, real-time solution that can deliver deterministic latency at message delivery and dispatch as well as provide support for real-time services over the Web.

I am happy to announce that Kaazing has successfully secured its first round of funding, after its initial seed round. We owe a special thank you to our private investors based here in Silicon Valley. For additional details have a look at Guidewire’s post on the subject.

To those in Europe this summer, I will be speaking at TSSJ in Prague. I will be delivering two talks focused on AJAX and Comet:
Ajax Gone Wild: Making Sense of Server-side Ajax Frameworks and Enterprise Comet: Building a Richer, More Interactive Web Application. Hope to see you there!

I am happy to welcome Michael Carter to the Kaazing team as our Comet Architect. Michael is an avid contributor the Comet community, speaking at industry events and writing articles for the Comet community’s primary source of information, Comet Daily. In addition to his contributions to the greater Comet community, Michael is also the lead developer and advocate for the open source Comet server Orbited. The Comet experience and overall excellence that Michael brings to Kaazing is certain to have a lasting and significant impact on Kaazing’s upcoming release of Enterprise Comet.

Today marks the start of AJAX World in New York City. The tag line this year is “Decision Year for RIAs.” I have to say that that this statement could not be closer to the truth. Gone are many of the exhibitors and sponsors I had come to associate with AJAX World, namely Backbase, Open Laszlo, ICESoft, and Adobe. Is this the tell tale signs of a technology in demise or simply a conference suffering from today’s market woes? I lack the expertise to pass such judgement, but the question I pose still remains.

To those attending the conference, please stop by and see Jonas Jacobi and I in the exhibition hall and/or at one of our sessions:

Comet: The Web that Is Instantly On and Always On - Tuesday
HTTP Multicast Routing, Scaling the Real-Time Web - Wednesday

For those in the UK, Jonas Jacobi and I will be speaking at QCon this week. You will find me at a panel discussion on “Architecting for Performance and Scalability” on Thursday 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. This should be an interesting discussion, I will do my best to represent Comet amongst these industry veterans. Jonas will be giving a talk on “HTTP Multicast Routing, Scaling the Real-Time Web”, covering Kaazing’s flagship product, Enterprise Comet. The talk is Friday 14:30 - 15:30 in the Rutherford Room. See you then!

We are happy to announce that Kaazing is now a member of the OpenAjax Alliance. Our hope is that by participating in the efforts of the alliance that we will help accelerate the adoption of Comet- and AJAX-related technologies. One of our primary concerns is in the area of Comet is protocols. (You can parse the posts on this topic at Comet Daily for full disclosure on the subject.) Fortunately, the alliance is an excellent place to work with other leading Comet vendors such as Lightstreamer, Dojo, and Jetty to define a standard method for Comet-based client-server communications. Ideally, the approach we define will take advantage of emerging standards such as HTML 5 server events, and facilitate the development of simple pub/sub APIs over an efficient HTTP headers based transport. Dojo’s Bayuex protocol definitely provides an answer for a simple API, but the verdict is still out on its mechanism of transport–namely JSON strings tucked in an HTTP message body. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see what evolves out of Kaazing’s collaborative efforts with the alliance. Will a new standard emerge? Or, will Bayuex evolve from a de facto-standard to an industry wide standard? Only time will tell and standardization in either case will certainly be for the greater good of Comet.