Comted, barcamp & me: the way we “push” things around at MS
Posted by isha on August 22, 2007
The much anticipated Barcamp 3 was a great success! Many of us springsters gathered at the PSPL Campus to represent MangoSpring and show others why it is one of the best technology companies in Pune.
Our very own Springster Anil was one of the organizers of the Barcamp. He did a great job juggling back and forth between his event organization duties and joining the fun with his fellow Springsters. The sessions for the day were well coordinated in advance, and lots of people showed up to share and gain knowledge. The only two lady speakers at the barcamp were my fellow Springster Anjali (our happiness manager) and myself. Our sessions were slotted for the afternoon, which gave us both the opportunity attend the other presentations with our fellow colleges and soak up as much from the other presenters as we could.
MangoSpring’s time to shine started in the afternoon with Anjali speaking about “Organization 2.0″. It was a very healthy discussion on how we are building “culture” at MangoSpring. For more on this, see Anjali’s blog below. Following Anjali’s presentation, we gave a glimpse of the technical work done at MangoSpring. I was then let loose to talk about one of the technologies that we use here- “Push Technology-Cometd”.
To briefly explain “Push Technology-Cometd”, it is an alternative means for data delivery to the browser. Our classic web paradigm of “Pull Technology “gives us some hiccups when it comes to real-time based or multi-user applications. In a normal web-based application which needs to show fresh data, we expect the client to request (poll) the server at frequent intervals in time to maintain the freshness of data. However, this leaves high chances of the user seeing stale data for some amount of time before the next polling cycle kicks in. “Push” addresses this problem with its completely opposite approach. Using “Push”, the client initially opens a long-lived connection with the server and registers its interests in the specific channel it wants. From then on, the server
pushes data and updates the respective client as and when the data changes. Using this technology, the freshness of data is maintained for the end-user without any user or periodic browser intervention.
Cometd is a project which implements this technology and has drafted a spec called Bayeux, to make implementation of Push Technology more standardized and
developer friendly. The Cometd server implementation which we work on is being written entirely in Java. Many more details that I talked about in the presentation are captured in the slideshow uploaded with this blog.
At the end of my talk there was a good Q&A session which reflected the interest of the audience in the session. This was great for me, because it gave me an opportunity to get my thoughts across. Afterwards, many people also had specific implementation questions and questions about multiple server implementations of Cometd.
After the presentation was over, it was a great feeling knowing that I shared everything that I had set out to. It was also great to have our fellow Springsters there for support and motivation. The cheers from Abhinav, Anil, Anuj, Basant, Hari, Nilesh and Rana were much appreciated!
When all was said and done, the end of Barcamp 3 Pune left the Springsters with enriched knowledge and greater confidence ….and don’t forget the smiles on our faces!