Simon Willison’s Weblog

ZeroMQ: Modern and Fast Networking Stack. I get ZeroMQ now. I was having trouble figuring out how it differed from things like RabbitMQ—it turns out it’s an entirely new low-level socket abstraction, designed to make common socket programming tasks like message sending/receiving and publish/subscribe a whole lot easier than dealing with raw BSD sockets.

# 5th September 2010, 7:41 pm / io, messaging, networking, sockets, zeromq, recovered

Independence Day: HTML5 WebSocket Liberates Comet From Hacks. The HTML5 spec now includes WebSocket, a TCP-style persistent socket mechanism between client and server using an HTTP handshake to work around firewalls. The Orbited comet implementation provides a WebSocket compatible API to existing browsers today, and can also act as a firewall/proxy between WebSocket and regular TCP sockets, allowing browsers to talk to things like XMPP servers using Orbited to bridge the gap.

# 4th July 2008, 9:54 am / comet, html5, orbited, sockets, tcpsocket, websockets, xmpp