The Orbited blog recently provided information about improvements coming to Orbited 0.5. They’re skipping a 0.4 release, going straight from 0.3 to 0.5. There are a few notes about changes in migrating from 0.3, including:

• orbited.js still contains an Orbited.connect function, but this function now may takes only two arguments: event_cb and token. Orbited connections are now identified by a single token string. If you provide multiple arguments, the JavaScript client will simply concatenate them with commas in between.
• when you use an orbit client to send data from your web application, the list of recipients should just be strings that exactly match the token used from the JavaScript
• There is no proxy. Instead, Orbited.connect will just work in all browsers cross-port and cross-subdomain.
• You need to specify where the orbited server is via JavaScript globals. ORBITED_DOMAIN = ‘127.0.0.1′; ORBITED_PORT = 8000; for example.

While the Orbited team is offering backwards-compatibility, this is really just for convenience as they have completed changed their architecture. Gone is the simplistic message queue routing messages to the browser, replaced by a socket proxy, exposing a TCPConnection to JavaScript, relaying packets via actual, raw TCP connections on the back end.

That’s a really interesting approach that makes it much easier to integrate with arbitrary services and protocols. For full details, be sure to check out the Orbited 0.5 blog post.