Juggernaut

I was playing with low-latency reversed-AJAX for quite some time during last summer already. Apparently decent implementation of the push-features is a huge gap in modern browsers. Facebook and java world apparently is in love with COMET. Some nice apps, such as Etherpad use it quite successfully. Facebook decided to go half-way through and reopens http connection once every couple of seconds (hell yeah, very efficient). 

Solution based on on WebSockets appears to be far beyond the horizon due to super-dirty specification and implementation Juggernaut was an answer. Following a least-resistance, maximum coverage approach, client-side connectivity of Juggernaut is implemented as very minimal AJAX component attached to every page. Yes, it is dirty but one has to admit, that it covers 99% of browsers' market. 

Today I was very surprised to find that 2nd generation Juggernaut is node.js and Redis based. Apparently there are whole (json-serialised) objects being transferred. Intriguing.