Ajax Push Engine 1.0 released

I’m quite unlucky because I’ve downloaded the APE BETA5 just before they (I mean Anthony Catel) released the 1.0. The quite interesting part is that it fixes all the bugs I’ve talked about sooner. So we could say my last post won’t be very useful to anyone. Still, if you want to compile APE on CentOS x64, you have have to edit the modules/Makefile file and add the -L/usr/lib64/mysql command arg. It will give you something like that : ...

December 8, 2009 · Florent Clairambault

Ajax Push Engine 1.0 Beta 5

I talked quickly about APE in a recent post. I recently downloaded a new version of their program and I’ve installed it successfully and it works much better. Since the first released verison, it has become quite easy, you just have to launch “./build.sh”. I had some problems with the linker on my CentOS system and the mysql libraries. But I solved it by added “-L/var/lib64/mysql” to some line of the Makefile. ...

December 6, 2009 · Florent Clairambault

Push (Comet) or pull ?

What is it ? Most of the modern web applications display recently updated data, and to do that they need to get he latest data very frequently. Some of them even include some real-time chat (Gmail Chat, Facebook chat). How ? That’s the interesting part. Pull is pretty dumb. You do a request very frequently and you see if anything new appeared. This consumes some bandwidth, some resources (because server has to check if data has actually changed). Push is going back to the source : Once you’ve made the request on the server, it doesn’t reply instantly. It will wait for something before sending anything. So push over HTTP is in fact a pull with a sleeping response. Using push over HTTP is called Comet. So pushing data isn’t very complex, it just requires a special server to transmit some data (text, html, xml, or image) over an already opened HTTP connection. ...

November 23, 2009 · Florent Clairambault