If realtime messaging is a new and cool thing, what were chat rooms back in the day? not realtime? Am I missing something? I don't remember needing reloading those pages...
All that aside, this is amazing.
All that aside, this is amazing.
That said, it seems that since the "digital revolution" we go through these re-inventions of basic ideas and tools quite frequently. We've had "email" since the time multiple people could use a computer; recently, I commented on HN about how someone reinvented server log analysis tools to find click fraud (they were outsourcing analytics and apparently were unaware that web server logs ever existed.)
However MSIE6 also supports XmlHttpRequest (though an Active-X Control), which you can also use for real-time communication. Just setup a XmlHttpRequest and let the request idle on the server-side until new data become available.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_I/O
http://www.slideshare.net/joshzhu/nginx-internals
http://www.aosabook.org/en/nginx.html
http://serverfault.com/questions/86674/why-is-nginx-so-fast
Edit: formatting.