Comet Introduction
From the wikipedia page:
Comet is an umbrella term used to describe a technique allowing web browser to receive almost real time updates from the server. The two most common approaches are long polling and streaming. Long polling differs from streaming in that each update from the server ultimately results in another follow up request from the server. With streaming, there is one long lived request serving multiple updates. The following sections will cover each option with samples of how to implement each approach.
Long Polling
With long polling an initial request is made to the server. This request is “parked” waiting for an update. This sleeping request is then awakened when an event is called on the CometHandler for the request. CometHandler is an interface in the Grizzly framework which an application developer implements to register a suspended request with the comet system and manage event and lifecycle issues. CometHandler is typically where your application logic for your comet-based applications lives. The following example shows how to set up a long polling request and notify it about events. This code is taken from the count-clicker comet sample in the grizzly comet-counter sample.
public class CounterHandler extends DefaultCometHandler<HttpServletResponse> {
private HttpServletResponse httpResponse;
private AtomicInteger counter;
CounterHandler(HttpServletResponse httpResponse, final AtomicInteger counter) {
this.httpResponse = httpResponse;
this.counter = counter;
}
public void onEvent(CometEvent event) throws IOException {
if (CometEvent.Type.NOTIFY == event.getType()) {
httpResponse.addHeader("X-JSON", "{\"counter\":" + counter.get() + " }");
PrintWriter writer = httpResponse.getWriter();
writer.write("success");
writer.flush();
event.getCometContext().resumeCometHandler(this);
}
}
public void onInterrupt(CometEvent event) throws IOException {
httpResponse.addHeader("X-JSON", "{\"counter\":" + counter.get() + " }");
PrintWriter writer = httpResponse.getWriter();
writer.write("success");
writer.flush();
}
}
This is the CometHandler for our simple counter application. In this simple case, it has an AtomicInteger for tracking count requests and return the incremented value for each event. This handler is registered in a servlet as shown below.
public class LongPollingServlet extends HttpServlet {
final AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger();
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
private String contextPath = null;
@Override
public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
super.init(config);
ServletContext context = config.getServletContext();
contextPath = context.getContextPath() + "/long_polling";
CometEngine engine = CometEngine.getEngine();
CometContext cometContext = engine.register(contextPath);
cometContext.setExpirationDelay(5 * 30 * 1000);
}
@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
throws ServletException, IOException {
CometEngine engine = CometEngine.getEngine();
CometContext<HttpServletResponse> context = engine.getCometContext(contextPath);
final int hash = context.addCometHandler(new CounterHandler(res, counter));
}
@Override
protected void doPost(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res)
throws ServletException, IOException {
counter.incrementAndGet();
CometContext<HttpServletResponse> context = CometEngine.getEngine().getCometContext(contextPath);
context.notify(null);
PrintWriter writer = res.getWriter();
writer.write("success");
writer.flush();
}
}
The first request comes into doGet() which will create the CometHandler and add it to the CometContext. CometContext.addHandler() will suspend this request. In the html for the application, there’s a link which executes a POST against the server which calls doPost(). Here, what we’re doing is notifying the entire context of an event. This will cause onEvent() to be called for each registered CometHandler. That, as we’ve seen, will return the counter value to the browser. After this event is processed, the suspended requests will be resumed and eventually terminated normally. On the client side, once that GET request is terminated, the javascript in the page will submit yet another GET request. This request is suspended again as describe above and the process can repeat indefinitely. The javascript needed for this is shown below:
var counter = {
'poll' : function() {
new Ajax.Request('long_polling', {
method : 'GET',
onSuccess : counter.update
});
},
'increment' : function() {
new Ajax.Request('long_polling', {
method : 'POST'
});
},
'update' : function(req, json) {
$('count').innerHTML = json.counter;
counter.poll();
}
}
There are three basic functions involved in this application: poll, increment, and update.
-
poll: This function makes the GET requests to the server which are ultimately suspended. On a successful return from that call, update() is called…
-
update: This where the page is updated with the results from the server. This function takes the json object returned from the servlet and updates the display accordingly. The last thing it does is call back to poll() which initiates another suspended request.
-
increment: This function is called whenever you click the link in the application. It initiates the POST request that causes the server state to change and results in the client side updates. There is no handling of the response from this request.
That’s all it takes for a simple long polling based application. Long polling applications are well suited for handling low frequency events from the server such as updates to pages in response to user actions. Because of the need for renegotiation of subsequent requests after each event, applications with high event frequency are best served by streaming applications as we’ll see below. Long polling, however, is more proxy friendly in many cases. Many proxies balk at seeing long-lived connections and might close them according to various security or connection timeout policies.
Streaming
TBD