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.

Google I/O 2009 is being held on May 27 and 28 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. One of the key themes of this year’s event is the unprecedented acceleration of the open web platform: Nearly half a billion people now use browsers that are rooted in open source technology, which have quintupled their processing power in less than a year. Now, the new functionality in HTML 5 — from graphics and location to local storage and background processing — is enabling developers to build uniquely powerful 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.