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();
}
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:
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.
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.
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:
The Orbited core development team is pleased to announce the release of Orbited 0.2.0.
Core Team:
Our Goals:
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):
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.
I chatted with Rob Morris this evening via the orbited livehelp demo. He later joined us with a real irc client on freenode (you don’t actually have to use the livehelp app to talk to us. Just join the irc chat.) He had a number of questions that were particularly good, so I asked him to send me all of his thoughts / concerns about orbited in an email. Within an hour he sent me an email with a list of points, all of them very valid. The list is so great that I decided to post it here. To some extent I think you can treat the coming responses as a todo list for the Orbited development team. I’ll answer some of them in my blog, but primarily I want to make the answers more accessible directly from the orbited page.
Note that I’m not suggesting that all of these are open questions — far from it. Rather, not all of these questions have answers that are accessible without reading the mailing list archives, reading this entire blog, or talking with us directly. Without further adieu, here’s his email:
So, here are my thoughts right now. This is basically a brain dump of what my concerns are after a day of looking at and playing with Orbited.
I’m sure I’m missing obvious things, and that some of my concerns aren’t valid/relevant. Take with a large grain of salt!
Documentation Gaps
Lord knows, this is a big one, but here are 4 that jump to mind.
Support Issues
Best Practices
Basically, I’d like to see a map of what a real production Orbited deployment would look like. At the least, you need to address the following:
Other Issues
