In an IM conversation, Julien pointed me to this JavaWorld article http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2008/jw-03-asynchhttp.html that discusses asynchronous, non-blocking HTTP. It's by the author of xsocket (http://xsocket.sourceforge.net/).
He does a good job promoting the benefits of async HTTP and provides some detail about how to use his framework. It's a good read and very interesting. He covers comet heavily in his article too. There's certainly experience there that we can benefit from and it also validates a lot of the ideas we've discussed for AsyncWeb. I need to dig deeper into xsocket to better understand its API but just a cursory glance of some of the examples in the article indicate to me that there are things that we're definitely doing better in AHC and AsyncWeb client. -Mike
