WebSockets and Comet on the iPhone

blog.taskforceapp.com

9 points·maccman··6 comments

That's such a clever code maccman. Very impressive way to get around Apple's decision to disable WebSockets...

I am already using the gmail widget and its proved to be so useful. I am very pleased that I can now sync it to a mobile platform.

Keep up the good work.

Not that it's not cool and all, but long polling ajax is ancient tech, not really anything new or innovative.

True, it is fairly ancient. However, the beauty is in the implementation - i.e. emulating the WebSocket API and using the same endpoint.

"However, annoyingly Apple decided to disable WebSockets in iOS 4. What's strange was that WebSocket support was in all the previous development releases - oh well..."

Well of course they did. Background/multi task the web browser with WebSockets and you effectively avoid all need to publish to the App Store. Once a standard is chosen for displaying notifications through Javascript to the browser, there will be less and less need for a "native" apps on any platform.

I am not sure I understand you. What does WebSockets provide that would make me not need to develop, distribute (!) native iOS apps? WebSockets do not have anything to do with user interfaces, audio, OpenGL, etc.

WebGL, Firefox's new audio APIs and near infinite number of css/js toolkits are blurring the lines in all of those categories. I understand it's a ways off, but if you used nose-bleed versions of Chrome, Pepper, NPAPI, etc you can have extremely close to native capably apps through the browser. This is where I highly expect Android and Chromium OS to converge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com