Atmosphere
The Asynchronous WebSocket/Comet Framework
The Atmosphere Framework contains client and server side components for building Asynchronous Web Application. The majority of popular frameworks are either supporting Atmosphere or supported natively by the framework. The Atmosphere Framework supports all majors Browsers and Servers
Atmosphere transparently supports WebSockets, Server Side Events (SSE), Long-Polling, HTTP Streaming (Forever frame) and JSONP.
Atmosphere is a Java technolog framework that provides a common API for using the Comet and WebSocket features of many of the web servers, including Tomcat, Jetty, GlassFish, Weblogic, Grizzly, JBossWeb, JBoss, and Resin.
Atmosphere can detect native server APIs (for Comet and WebSockets) and switch back to Servlet 3.0, if available, for Comet. Or, also for Comet, it will fall back to a "managed" asynchronous mode (but not as scalable as Jetty Continuations). Atmosphere has been around for more than two years, and it is still in active development.
The Atmosphere framework is composed of the Atmosphere runtime, which provides a common API for all different web server solutions and standards. On top of this, the client can access the API and Reverse Ajax features through the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) by setting up a mere servlet. Or, you can also use Jersey, a framework implementing the JSR-311 (JAX-RS specification).
Atmosphere's strength remains on the server side: it provides a standardized API that covers all of the different solutions and ways to communicate with WebSockets or Comet. Atmosphere does not use a protocol between the client and server, like Socket.IO and CometD. Both libraries provide a client-side JavaScript and a server-side servlet that communicate using a specific protocol (for handshaking, messaging, acknowledgment, and heartbeat). Atmosphere's goal is to provide a common communication channel on the server side.
Atmosphere comes with a jQuery client library to facilitate the connection setup, which is able to automatically detect the best transport available (WebSockets or CometD). Usage of Atmosphere's jQuery plugin is similar to the HTML5 WebSockets API. First, you connect to the server, register a callback to receive messages, and then you can push some data.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
If you have to deploy a web application in several web servers that you can't control. You'll have a better chance that the Reverse Ajax features of your application work correctly due to the number of web servers supported by Atmosphere.
When you need a common API over a raw Reverse Ajax communication, without any protocol defined, because you want to develop or extend it.
|
Lack of documentation about Atmosphere's architecture, project, concepts, and APIs, which is helpful if you need to go into the source code or analyze several provided samples. The API is highly technical, and sometimes obscure, compared to the simple APIs of other frameworks, such as Socket.IO and CometD. Even when using Atmosphere annotations, some names and attributes were too technical.
Though a good abstraction on the server side, there is not a good client library. There is no protocol, so all additional features are left to the developer. The current library is too simple for the needs of a big, scalable web application if you require advanced timeout detection, acknowledgement, back-off, cross-domain and so on, especially when working with mobile devices. In this case, CometD is much more reliable; it leverages a communication protocol that can be used to activate some control flow and error detection, all provided within CometD. Using the CometD JavaScript client with the Atmosphere CometD plugin could be a good alternative if you need extra features.
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기