InfoQ is running an interview with Comet Daily’s Jean-Francois Arcand about Grizzly and bringing Comet to the masses with Atmosphere, a new POJO-based Comet framework

InfoQ: Would you like to describe to us what the Atmosphere framework is all about and what where the driving forces that led to it?

JFA: Two years ago I’ve blogged about the Grizzly Comet Framework, and since that time I was able to build a community around it. One of the drawback of the Grizzly Comet Framework is it only work with Grizzly runtime and GlassFish, which is a severe limitation. Over the year, peoples have asked to port the framework to other container like Tomcat, Jetty and Resin. So my goal with Atmosphere is to take the best from the Grizzly Comet Framework (one component who is called Grizzlet) and made it working with all container, supporting Comet or not. This way peoples don’t have to wait for the Servlet 3.0 spec before being able to write portable Comet/Ajax Push application. It also brings much more than what the Servlet 3.0 Spec will offer.

InfoQ: What about support for the Bayeux publish/subscribe protocol in both Grizzly and Atmosphere?

JFA: The Bayeux implementation can probably be implemented on top of Atmosphere. But for now, I will focus on Atmosphere itself and make sure I can grow a community around it. Once release 1.0 will be done, we will see if we can makes the Bayeux protocol working on top of it.

InfoQ: What will be the future of Grizzly with respect to Atmosphere? Is the new framework a replacement?

JFA: Atmosphere will just move the comet activities from Grizzly into a new project. Recently we have moved our grizzly-jruby extension into a new project called GlassFish scripting. Atmosphere will be our second extension to graduate to a new project.

Grizzly main component, NIO framework and its http extension will stay under the Grizzly umbrella. We are actively working on Grizzly 2.0 right now (with a new lead so I can concentrate on Atmosphere) and a lot of activities will also happens on that side.

Be sure to check out the full interview for more details.