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Comment by joe24pack | Hacker News Reader

Find a good way to have an asynchronous feed back from a web server to a web client, a true general purpose "push" protocol as an extension of HTTP. Hey you can even call it HTTP2W or HTTP2HTTP. Of course you'll have to come up with not only the protocol definition but also a reference implementation for both the client and the server. Sounds like fun, eh?

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Already exists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29

Thanks, I'm aware of Comet. Not exactly what I meant, in Comet the connection stays open after being initiated by the client. I'm looking for something where the interaction is first client-to-server, then client registers a "callback" address and port that it will listen to. This would be followed by a server-to-client call where the server will send updates/events to client as they happen, the client then decides what to do with those events. I want to avoid a persistent connection, and either the "heartbeat" client requests or other forms of polling by the client. The interaction that I'm looking for is more akin to a P2P sort of model.

I think firewall and NAT ubiquitousness (is that a word?) would make this unfeasible.

Yet another reason to speed the transition to IPv6.

IPv6 has nothing to do with firewalls and NAT issues. Firewalls in particular will remain in place and render this setup unfeasible.

You want a different and more complicated solution to an already solved problem?

I believe that YCombinator also declined to fund this idea ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95931 ), which demonstrates how hard it is to have a good idea.

Sounds like it will be impossible to make money.

Hey, I like to make a buck just like the next guy, but it still sounds like a neat thing to work on. I'm sure you could find a way to charge someone something after developing this.

Well look at comet, django, rails, scriptalicious, and just about all other frameworks or neat pieces of code that developers can use to do something better.

None of them make any money.

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