module proposal: BOSH

[Gabriel Ramuglia]

A listening socket on the client isn't going to really work because of
firewalls and other network nastiness. And HTTP is the preferred
method for this kind of thing because it works on browsers without
modifying them. Assuming a new standard were made, it would be a good
number of years before the browsers that most people use would support
them, so the standard would be useless anyway, whereas http works now.

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 5:31 AM, Igor Clark <igor at pokelondon.com> wrote:
> I can obviously see how clever a lot of it is, but am I the only person who
> finds all this Comet/Bayeux/BOSH/Javascript "TCP sockets"/etc stuff slightly
> unsettling? If you push and bend (e.g.) HTTP to do all this stuff it was
> never intended to do, won't it, and all the infrastructure supporting it,
> eventually just break? OK, so there's Jetty and nginx can handle loads of
> keepalives and so on and so forth, but ...
>
> If people want bidirectional comms with browsers, if they want
> publish/subscribe mechanisms, wouldn't all this work by very clever people
> be better directed towards getting a sensible security infrastructure in
> place to allow listening sockets in client sandboxes, rather than building
> ever bigger wrappers with sticky tape and bits of string?
>
> </devil's advocate>
>
> On 7 Aug 2008, at 05:36, Adam Michaels wrote:
>
>> After much headache with Ejabberd and some internal discussions, we talked
>> about Nginx supporting the BOSH protocol. This would allow simple creation
>> of scalable instant message systems and anything else that requires
>> stateless connections to act statefully.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOSH
>>
>> Nginx would hold 2 client connections and create a persistent connection
>> to upstream servers. To even begin to make this possible, Nginx would need
>> to support persistent connections to upstreams. What is the status of that
>> feature? Its been listed on the feature request page in the wiki for a
>> while.
>>
>> Anyone interested in seeing this?
>>
>
> --
> Igor Clark • POKE • 10 Redchurch Street • E2 7DD • +44 (0)20 7749 5355 •
> www.pokelondon.com
>
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