The Orbited core development team is pleased to announce the release of Orbited 0.2.0.

Core Team:

• Michael Carter
• Jacob Rus
• Mario Balibrera

Our Goals:

• Support all major browsers without loading bars, clicks, or hour glasses
• Create a standard, interoperable Orbited js library
• Refactor transport architecture to achieve greater extensibility
• Create a plugin system
• Standardize logging / debugging output
• Standardize the urls
• Increase the separation of orbited sub modules

Orbited 0.2 is nearly a complete rewrite of most of Orbited’s internal components. It reorganizes architecture while leaving external interfaces nearly unchanged.

There are many great new features that will be documented over the course of the next few weeks via blog posts and updates to the core documentation. In particular, stay posted for information about the new plugin system. We provide a simple admin application as an example of how to create a plugin. Also stay posted for documentation on creating new transports by extending orbited’s Comet transport system.

We would like to thank the following contributors of documentation, patches, tutorials, and ideas for their time (in no particular order, and apologies to anyone we forgot to list):

• Paul Johnston
• Matthew Desmarais
• Mike Zaic
• Rob Morris
• Alex Russel
• Max Nickel
• Christian Czura
• Ciarán Walsh

I just received word that my talk titled “Comet for highly scalable applications” has been accepted to AjaxExperience. From the look of it, AjaxExperience will be a much nicer conference than AjaxWorld, at least in how they treat speakers. I’ve had personal assistance with scheduling from the conference organizer and they are paying my airfare. I’ll be giving a similar talk to that which I gave at AjaxWorld. As I’ve mentioned before, you can find those slides here, and the speaking outline here.

Orbited is coming along nicely. I’ve gone over all the patches that were submitted in the last month. I accepted a few directly, but most I had to rewrite. The reason is that we are skipping Orbited 0.1.6 and moving directly to Orbited 0.2.0 as most of the codebase has been changed. There’s been a complete restructuring so it’ll be easier for developers to get involved in specific parts of the project without understanding everything. In particular, creating and understanding transports will be very straightforward and will not require changing the Orbited source. We also moved away from the pipe-based urls like “/location|user,session,transport” in favor of standard query strings: “/location?user=x&session=y&transport=z”. I personally liked the look of the old urls, but the end-user never sees them, so the result was that Orbited sometimes breaks ie with no tangible benefit.

Stay tuned over the next week for Orbited 0.2.0. We’ll need help porting the documentation, though only minor changes will be needed in the javascript and application code.