At work, I’m playing a lot with Ajax and a couple of weeks ago, I’ve heard about the Comet paradigm.
The idea (that is used by GTalk integration in GMail) is to change the GET idea between Ajax into a PUSH one. In other words, the server gives the data to the client. If you know a little about HTTP 1.1 chunked you’ve got the key of the concept.
One way to do Comet is with the Python framework called Twisted (sorry PHP isn’t a viable way to achieve this goal) and the application construction kit called Nevow. Prefer the subversion version of each.
Come back to Twisted that is a very powerful framework to manage cool networking things like IRC, HTTP, TCP and so one. It works in an event-driven progamming and you can integrate GTK or Qt. Sounds promising, no ?
At the moment, I’ve only played with these tools without touching Comet but I need to try the PUSH way. Stay tuned.