Modern web applications such as Facebook, Twitter, or Gmail are incorporating real-time capabilities, which enable the application to continuously present the user with recently updated information. Unlike traditional applications, in real-time applications the common roles of browser and server can be reversed since the server needs to update the browser with new data, regardless of the browser request state. This means that unlike the common HTTP behavior, the server won't wait for the browser's requests. Instead, it will send new data to the browser whenever this data becomes available.

This reverse approach is often called Comet, a term coined by a web developer named Alex Russel back in 2006 (the term was a word play on the AJAX term; both Comet and AJAX are common household cleaners in the US). In the past, there were several ways to implement a Comet functionality using the HTTP protocol.

The first and easiest way is XHR polling. In XHR polling, the browser makes...