GWT / Comet: any experience?

Question

Is there any way to "subscribe" from GWT to JSON objects stream and listen to incoming events on keep-alive connection, without trying to fetch them all at once? I believe that the buzzword-du-jour for this technology is "Comet".

Let's assume that I have HTTP service which opens keep-alive connection and put JSON objects with incoming stock quotes there in real time:

{"symbol": "AAPL", "bid": "88.84", "ask":"88.86"}
{"symbol": "AAPL", "bid": "88.85", "ask":"88.87"}
{"symbol": "IBM", "bid": "87.48", "ask":"87.49"}
{"symbol": "GOOG", "bid": "305.64", "ask":"305.67"}
...

I need to listen to this events and update GWT components (tables, labels) in realtime. Any ideas how to do it?

Answer 1

I have used this technique in a couple of projects, though it does have it's problems. I should note that I have only done this specifically through GWT-RPC, but the principle is the same for whatever mechanism you are using to handle data. Depending on what exactly you are doing, there might not be much need to over complicate things.

First off, on the client side, I do not believe that GWT can properly support any sort of streaming data. The connection has to close before the client can actually process the data. What this means from a server-push standpoint is that your client will connect to the server and block until data is available at which point it will return. Whatever code executes on the completed connection should immediately re-open a new connection with the server to wait for more data.

From the server side of things, you simply drop into a wait cycle (the java concurrent package is particularly handy for this with blocks and timeouts), until new data is available. At that point in time, the server can return a package of data down to the client which will update accordingly. There are a bunch of considerations depending on what your data flow is like, but here are a few to think about:

• Is a client getting every single update important? If so, then the server needs to cache any potential events between the time the client gets some data and then reconnects.
• Are there going to be gobs of updates? If this is the case, it might be wiser to package up a number of updates and push down chunks at a time every several seconds rather than having the client get one update at a time.
• The server will likely need a way to detect if a client has gone away to avoid piling up huge amounts of cached packages for that client.

I found there were two problems with the server push approach. With lots of clients, this means lots of open connections on the web server. Depending on the web server in question, this could mean lots of threads being created and held open. The second has to do with the typical browser's limit of 2 requests per domain. If you are able to serve your images, css and other static content fro second level domains, this problem can be mitigated.

Answer 2

Some preliminary ideas for Comet implementation for GWT can be found here... though I wonder whether there is something more mature.