Getting 'Push' to Scale Is in the Cards - Software Development Times On The Web

Getting 'Push' to Scale Is in the Cards
Kaazing creates platform for asynchronous request processing
By David Rubinstein

August 29, 2007 — If an online poker tournament next month works as it is supposed to, then—“ka-zing!"—Jonas Jacobi might just begin to cash out.

Jacobi is the founder and CEO of a company called Kaazing, which is creating a specification for pushing information in real time from a server to a client, without requests.

"The ability to push information from a server to a client has been around [for] about 10 years, but it can't scale because you need to keep each connection open," Jacobi said. "Currently, a Web client will request information every two seconds, or five seconds. That puts a burden on the server side, if 50,000 people want it at the same time."

The key to scaling server-client communication, Jacobi explained, is asynchronous request processing, which allows one thread to be shared among many connections, rather than providing a thread for each connection. "With [asynchronous request processing], the user initiates one request when he navigates to the page. If there's no information available, there is no communication between the server and client. No threads need to be kept open. When something happens, the server broadcasts it out simultaneously." A subscribe mechanism allows data to be pushed out on one thread, but all subscribers to that thread will see the message, Jacobi explained.

I’ll See Your Hand
Jacobi said the poker tournament, which will be launched at AJAXWorld in Santa Clara at the end of September, is a proof of concept. Every player will be able to see his opponents' face cards as they are dealt, and then see and respond to every wager, Jacobi said, without having to wait for a server to respond to the request. When the next cards are dealt, the images are simply broadcast to all players at the same time. Jacobi indicated this type of solution has applications for viewing sports online, or a transit authority keeping track of buses or trains, or in financial markets, where data is updated often and quickly.

Kaazing's commercial offering will be known as Enterprise Comet, and it's based on the open source Comet technology for enabling real-time messaging from a Web server to one or more browsers. It uses Java APIs for JMS, and EJB for business logic and queuing, and then a JVM that resides in a Java container such as Apache Tomcat, Sun's Project Glassfish or codehaus.org’s Project Jetty. For the poker project, Jacobi said Kaazing is partnering with Terracotta, because that company's JVM clustering environment will scale enough to meet the project’s requirements.

For developers working on real-time solutions, Jacobi said the learning curve will be low, because it's just Java. "The development environment and model don't change. At the end of the day, you're deploying to a Java container. There's no arbitrary language or XML framework. It's not like going from Java to Flash."

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