There is now a "standart" way to break the "one thread per connection"
limit, due to the current servlet specification, in tomcat.
It took me less than 2 days (and 2 nights ;-) to update my product to
make use of the Comet API (using 6.0.7 beta) while retaining previous
behaviour for compatibility with other application servers and previous
versions of tomcat. Yes, you can turn Tomcat into a scalable SSL VPN
for mobile devices ...
Comet is a really nice API since:
- it allows to keep compatibility with non-comet servlet containers
without modifying deployment descriptors.
- it is simple.
- its implementation works well.
I only had to port the patches for
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=40960
and
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=37869
to version 6.0.7 and basic tests passed for my product in APR mode with
Comet servlet.
If you are interested by the v607 patches, I can provide them.
Feedback on the Comet API:
- There may be some ways to improve the documentation of the API: from
what I saw (I got caught by this one :-), it seems that one need to call
CometEvent.close() before throwing an exception in READ events or the
event keeps coming back forever. I could not find a reference to this
behaviour in documentation.
- Is there a rationale for receiving READ events when
request.getInputStream().available()==0 ?
I will do some scalability/load testing on my product and I will be able
to compare Comet-version versus previous version...
Keep on the good work !
Christophe Pierret
