Ajax killed the click-and-wait experience we once associated with the Web and today, Comet is eliminating the stale data-delivery associated with traditional Ajax techniques such as polling. However, based on recent progress within WebSockets in the HTML5 specification, Web developers can finally make streaming data to browsers in real-time a reality.

Sidda Eraiah looks at innovations in the HTML5 specification that will forever change the direction of the Web, and one in particular – WebSocket – that is expected to revolutionize the way we develop and deploy Web applications.

Over the last few decades, software applications evolved from character mode terminal applications , to desktop applications, to client/server (network enabled desktop) applications, and now to Web applications. Client/server applications brought distributed computing to reality first. One of the key differentiators for these client/server applications is connectivity – they connected to the server over a network and received and sent data over full duplex network connections and had access to realtime or near realtime data, depending on the network latency. The server could push a message to the client anytime.

In this interview we speak to Jonas Jacobi and John Fallows, the founders of Kaazing. Kaazing is the creator of the Kaazing Enterprise Gateway product and is active in the real-time bi-directional Internet technology space with the Kaazing gateway leveraging the new HTML 5 WebSocket standard. Jonas and John talk of the need for two way communication and compare it with established request-response and Ajax models of communication. They also touch on how WebSocket can be used in JavaEE applications and its impact on existing architecture and code.

India’s pioneering conference on Java technology gets bigger and better in its third year. The conference has always striven to bring great, vendor-neutral & international content. The 2008 event offers unmatched content and value. The conference website http://conference.indicthreads.com now has a preliminary list of speakers and sessions. Do check it out! There’s more coming! Register now to grab some great early bird discounts.