Google Comet?

At the Google I/O developer event a few interesting things have been announced. I blogged earlier this week about Google going real real-time with its Feed API and yesterday they announced some new features in Google App Engine.

The interesting part is this:

Channel API – The Channel API lets you build applications that can push content directly to your user’s browser (aka “Comet”). No more polling for updates!

Google have done things with Comet before, some of which are probably just polling, but others such as Google Wave are fully live updating.

With the feed API and the App Engine Channel API Google are opening up their Comet capabilities to outside developers. I look forward to more details on the Channel API and maybe dissecting how it works. Most Comet solutions implement a number of techniques, mainly for different browsers, so it will be interesting to see what Google have done.

Google have announced a number of other things at this event which I found interesting and look forward to trying out..

• Google Storage
• BigQuery and Prediction API
• Cloud Portability – including some impressive Rapid Application Development with Spring Roo