A couple of members of the Orbited team are in Portland for the 2008 OSCON. Michael Carter and Jacob Rus are giving a talk on Wednesday about the recent developments with sockets in the browser and how they’ll make web app development easier and faster. Michael has written two articles for Comet Daily that describe how to use the new HTML5 WebSocket spec:

• Sockets in the Browser
• Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks

Michael and Jacob will be around after the talk to chat and answer questions.

Update: We’ve scheduled a Comet BoF for Thursday 8p-9p in room E146. Stop by to chat about anything related to Comet.

the revolution
Orbited 0.5 enables a software developer to create robust, performant network applications for the web. If you know one of the common web frameworks, or are already comfortable writing PHP, for example, just download the Orbited client for your preferred language and you’re good to go. However, if you’ve never done any web work before, or are fed up with the traditional approach, you can just bypass the HTTP hacks altogether and instead write your internet application the way folks have been writing network software since the 70s - with a socket.

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Since discussing browser sockets, I’ve been doing some research on other implementations. For some time now, David Davis has had a browser socket with his Sprocket.Socket implementation.

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There is a new tutorial for Orbited 0.5 explaining how to write an IRC client with no server-side code! This is a good introduction to using TCPSocket for implementing clients for other protocols.

I’ve been making various little canvas graphics for an upcoming browser-based pure-JavaScript real-time multiplayer game, and decided to implement some shape primitives. Specifically, I created functions for drawing circles and regular polygons. Then, I decided I could use some curvy and straight stars, and, based on the regular polygon code, made two more functions, regularQuadraticStar and regularStar. Here’s an example of 50 of these shapes drawn on a canvas:

First, and most simply, a circle function. This one is not too much easier than just using the «context».arc function directly, but it makes code a tiny bit clearer, and also saves a couple of lines of code for each circle:

var circle = function (context, x, y, radius) {
  var c = context;
  c.beginPath();
  c.arc(x,y,radius,0,Math.PI*2, true)
  c.closePath();
}

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You may have noticed the lack of a 0.4.x release. We tried to make a number of improvements for 0.4.x, but ultimately we never thought that branch was stable enough to release. The 0.5.0 release, on the other hand, is the most stable and feature-rich version of Orbited yet. This is a pre-announcement that should give you a day or two notice and some information about porting your app to 0.5. You can expect the official release announcement over the next couple of days.

While we still support the old orbited protocol, there are a couple of differences when using Orbited 0.5.x with 0.3.x applications:

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We had a number of technical issues for the past few months. Adrian Weisberg has recently taken over as the administrator and editor of this blog. Now that we’re back on track you can expect blog activity to resume.

The orbited 0.4.0 branch has been under heavy development for the past month and we are finally starting to near an alpha release. While this release won’t be immediately useful to Comet developers, it can give you a good idea of what will be in the final Orbited 0.4.0 release. There’s news on a new website, the ORBIT protocol, the STOMP Protocol, layered communication, CSP, Revolved, deployability, and the goals for the 0.4 branch.

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One of the most frequent problems people have with Orbited generally surfaces before they write a single line of application logic — before, in fact, they successfully start the Orbited server for the first time. This problem is pyevent. It’s a brilliant piece of software, but many of us want to build small projects or simply prototype without having to install two sets of additional headers and gcc.

To most of you, I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a great hardship. Comet developers, however, are not most of anything. We’re strange people and we often work under strange conditions. My house loses its internet connection every few minutes; other developers are subject to the irrational decrees of their admins, or the arcane limitations of their indie operating systems. People have literally decided not to use Orbited because they couldn’t compile pyevent properly. We’re modern folks, and the rule is: make it work for everyone.

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The Orbited team is happy to announce the release of Orbited 0.3.0.

Orbited 0.3 is an evolutionary update to Orbited 0.2, with several new and exciting features, improved stability and efficiency, and some groundwork for future improvements.

Most notably, the Revolved publish/subscribe system has been rolled into Orbited. To start it, visit `http://orbited_server:8000/_/revolved/manage/`.

Other improvements include:

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