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Jonas Jacobi's JSF/Ajax and Trinidad Blog

I recognize that my blog has been quiet for some time, but there is a reason: Kaazing Corporation. Kaazing Corporation is essentially realizing a dream, a dream to start a company. Now, we (John Fallows and myself) are about to publicly launch Kaazing and our first customer project - the first ever AJAXWorld Poker Tournament (with some great help from Brian Albers and team - thank you, thank you!!).

I guess there are several ways to start your own company, but this is essentially how we did it; first we ensured that we had a very good lawyer. Secondly, we made sure that all our corporate matters were sorted out BEFORE we started development. This included corporate filings, employee benefits/hr, accounting, insurances, a place to be etc... This took up more time than expected, but I'm truly glad that we did it. Can't imagine having to take care of that at the same time as creating the AjaxWorld Poker Tournament. With these two big ticket items out of the way we were able to fully focus on development and on delivering the AjaxWorld Poker Tournament.


Enterprise Comet

So what is Enterprise Comet? We needed a Java-based real-time solution that could leverage all the benefits of Comet and Bayeux without requiring us to write client-side code e.g. JavaScript. We also noted during our research that one theme came back over and over again - today we design and create request-driven Web applications, but with a pattern such as Comet, we are looking at a paradigm shift - event-driven Web applications, similar to that of traditional desktop applications. With this in mind we realized that to succeed we had to design our solution from scratch with Comet as main focus, and not as an afterthought. Here are some of our requirements:

• Real-Time Web (Comet and Bayeux)
• Java 6 Support
• JMS, JMX, and EJB
• Java binary support
• All major Java EE containers (Glassfish, Tomcat, and Jetty)
• All major Java IDEs (Eclipse, Netbeans, ...)
• All major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, ...)
• No plug-ins or downloads

In the ideal scenario we wanted to run Java on the client, but this required a plug-in to be installed in the client browser. So, we had to figure out a way to run Java in the browser without the required plug-in, which brings me to the Chai VM.

Chai VM

After some discussions we decided that the best approach to "extend" the reach of JMS, JMX, and EJB to the browser was to create a VM that could handle Java binaries and translate Java to JavaScript for the browser. We named this project Chai VM. The Chai VM is one of the key features of Enterprise Comet and provides plug-in free support for Java in the browser. Now developers can build real-time Web 2.0 applications entirely in Java, AND only deploy the Java binaries. All Enterprise Comet applications are dynamically loaded at runtime and only application logic used will be loaded.

Additional benefits using the Chai VM are: no requirement to re-compile an application after updating to a new version of the VM and no static JavaScript files to deploy, making maintenance simpler. One could say that the Chai VM acts as a cross compiler for Java targeting Web client technologies, such as JavaScript. Also, with the Chai VM we now have a “Web desktop” development environment similar to that offered by Java for traditional desktop applications.

Two more things; first, there is no additional setup to deploy to standard Java EE containers. Secondly, Enterprise Comet automatically handles the payload between client and server, and supports sending serializable Java objects across tiers.

AJAXWorld Poker Tournament

Ok, back to the AJAXWorld Poker Tournament. On a request from SYS-CON Media's event group we signed on to develop a poker tournament for their AJAXWorld 2007 West conference. This has been a fun and exciting project all built using Enterprise Comet and we are all anxious to see this tournament up and running live. I'm not going to spill the beans since I know Brian Albers is preparing a great talk about the Poker Tournament for the AJAXWorld conference.

Enterprise Comet Roadmap

Enterprise Comet, Release 1.0 Beta (Late fall 2007)
Enterprise Comet, Release 1.0 Production (Early 2008)

Stay tuned for more information about Kaazing, Enterprise Comet, Comet, and other cool stuff.