James is talking about Streamlets, which “are a web streaming mechanism integrated into ActiveMQ reusing the Jetty web container”.
This is kinda cool, especially for those times when you need a nice simple way to go back and get data.
For example, we have used approaches like this when building a page which has to access various sources to get prices from many vendors, and we don’t want to “wait” for them all to come back before anything goes to the client.
In the past you would do weird things like displaying items, and then at the end, keep printing to the client, and print <script>// update that div with output now.
We really could use a bit richer model for web applications, but the jury’s out on what its gonna be – XAML, XUL, Flex or Flash – neither seems quite right yet.
We had to spend about two months ripping out a pushlet system recently because of the horrific performance. However using Jetty + NIO might give the performance back.
Yeah but this seems like another good idea to get around the browser limitations.