Juggernaut: Comet for Rails?

Alex MacCaw has released a plugin for Ruby on Rails that “aims to revolutionize your Rails app by letting the server initiate a connection and push data to the client. In other words your app can have a real time connection to the server with the advantage of instant updates.”

The plugin Juggernaut initiates a flash xmlsocket between server and browser allowing real time communication between the two. The open socket connection allows the server to ‘push’ base64 encoded javascript to the browser which is subsequently decoded and evaluated.

I see this as Comet for Rails, as it is about the interaction model not technology (e.g. if Flash or not). Alex may disagree :)

Frequently Asked Questions

What flash version does Juggernaut use?

Flash socket uses version 6 which is supported by more than 95% of users.

Does it work in all browsers?

It works in all the major ones: Firefox 1+, IE 6+ and Safari 2+.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of using a flash socket over other methods?

It’s better than comet because:

• It’s much less of a hack
• It doesn’t crash your browser (Comet can do this after a while)
• 95% of browsers support it (flash 6).
• It’s much easier to implement
• It can use a different port - unlike comet - so you don’t need any custom dispatch servlets for forwarding messages through rails to the push server - it can connect directly.

It’s better than polling because:

• Much cleaner
• Doesn’t use as many server resources