Comet Tutorial with Orbited and CherryPy

[Michael Carter]

Hello,

Orbited ( www.brbx.com/orbited ) is a daemon that allows you to send events from your application server (such as a cherrypy or turbogears app) directly to the browser. This is asynchronous communication and allows for you to create real-time applications such as gmail's chat or meebo's instant messenger. The project is still in the alpha stage of development, but it is quite usable. For anyone interested in incorporating comet-style communication into their turbogears applications, please take a look at http://brbx.com/orbited/tutorials/cherrychat.html which is a tutorial on creating a simple cherrypy-based chat application. The project is in its early stage, but a more turbogears-oriented tutorial is planned in the near future. I would appreciate community input on the current tutorial and recommendations to better utilize turbogears infrastructure.

Couple of notes about orbited:

- Orbited is very simple to use. The server code for the cherrychat application in the tutorial is about thirty lines, but only thirteen after you remove the boilerplate (cherrypy config and imports)
- It runs as a standalone daemon, though it can be given its own thread and run from an existing python application such as turbogears/cherrypy
- Its based on pyevent/libevent so its scales very well for this sort of communication
- The architecture for scaling laterally (multiple server nodes) is based on memcached and makes it trivial to add orbited nodes to your application
- The client api is very straightforward. Right now there is a simple pure python implementation thats used in the tutorial, but there is also a twisted-based implementation, as well as a pyevent/libevent based implementation.

Any suggestions, questions, or criticisms are very welcome.

-Michael Carter