I have been blogging on CometDaily since before we started Platformability so thought I would take a look back and see if there was anything there that might be of interest to our Platformability audience.
Early on in CometDaily’s lifetime I wrote a piece on the Evolution of Comet at Caplin which covers how Caplin’s core technology has evolved since the start in 1997. The article was written in 2007, so I thought I would say how things have moved on since then.
The article finishes off talking about Caplin Trader our Ajax trading front end framework. This is still a large focus for Caplin, but we have also expanded out. There is a lot of extra functionality on the backend that was developed along with Caplin Trader – higher level integration to Trading and Permissions for example. Although Caplin Trader allows you to host other RIA technologies within it, we also wanted to more openly support other client side technologies in their own right. So we worked on these APIs to create Caplin Xaqua which is the full stack of our software, from backend integration APIs, through Liberator (and Comet) out to our StreamLink client APIs, which we expanded to include .Net, Silverlight and Flex.
Coming back to Comet, with the new client APIs and also new browsers and browser versions, we improved our coverage of Comet techniques to ensure the best possible connection is made for each scenario.
And the future? Well I have blogged about HTML 5 WebSockets more than once and to reiterate, it is a good new tool for Comet server implementers (rather than people developing web applications themselves) and I’m sure when the market share for browsers supporting WebSocket grows we will be adding the capability to Liberator and Streamlink.