The HTML5 defined WebSocket has been gaining in popularity because of its efficient and intuitive approach to Comet. Orbited has done a great job preparing for the day when native implementations exist by providing the same WebSocket API that will eventually be provided by major web browsers.

While the support for WebSocket used to be tied to the Orbited Comet server, it has been recently decoupled from the server. The JavaScript layer of support was recently moved to js.io for maximum interoperability. Mario Balibrera just checked-in code for wrapping js.io with the Dojo-based package system, making it very easy for Dojo apps to now access the js.io APIs, and WebSocket in particular! In addition to support for dynamically including js.io namespaces, it is also of course very easy to roll your own Dojo build with WebSocket support! We’ll follow-up with a tutorial next week.