Saikat Chakrabarti of Mockingbird is looking to make the tool collaborative. Along the way he wanted to test out tools to make this happen, and one test ended up with a collaborative drawing program using Node.js with WebSocket support from Socket.IO:

, the actual interesting parts that are doing anything other than serving static files start [...]

James Coglan has ported a Ruby/EventMachine Comet server to offer a new Node.js server on the Bayeux protocol. The project is Faye and you can check out the code on GitHub.
On the client side:
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/comet.js”></script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

    CometClient = new Faye.Client(’/comet’);

    CometClient.connect();

</script>

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JAVASCRIPT:

  CometClient.subscribe(’/path/to/channel’, function(message) {

    // process received message object

  [...]

Greg Wilkins tried to get people to do better than WebSocket as it was being defined. His BWTP proposal didn’t get traction so what does he do? He introcuces a great Jetty WebSocket implementation:

Chrome and Firefox will soon be supporting WebSocket, so WebSocket (for better or for worse) will soon be available in the [...]

Following their recent acquisition by Google, AppJet announced they would open source EtherPad, the collaborative, real-time, notepad. That’s now done, and you can find the project home at – surprise, surprise – Google Code.
Checkout Instructions
Browse the Source
What’s especially cool about this is that Etherpad is Javascript all the way down. In a new ReadWriteWeb article [...]

The team at Weelya announced v1.0 of the Open source APE JavaScript Framework & APE Server, their comet-based push engine created to ease the client/server communication.
New features in APE 1.0:

New and improved communication protocol :

Entirely using JSON and fully extensible.
Several commands can be nested in one request.

New transport methods :

XHRStreaming : A single connection is [...]

Even PHP developers can write web applications that use all sorts of fancy long-polling.

That is what Leo said about his NGiNX HTTP push module:

This module turns Nginx into an adept HTTP Push and Comet server. It takes care of all the connection juggling, and exposes a simple interface to broadcast messages to clients via plain [...]

The following is a guest post. If you have something to say to the Ajaxian community, please feel free to either link us to your work, or give us a guest posting that goes into detail! Contact us.
My name is Jerod Venema, and I’m excited to write to you about our new Comet server for [...]

Would you like to talk messaging directly from the browser? Kamaloka is a new library that speaks AMQP. You can easily tie to Orbited but also, in theory, any other library that speaks TCPSockets.
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

   Orbited.settings.port = 9000;

   amqp_broker_port = 7000;

   amqp_conn = amqp.Connection({host: ‘localhost’,

                      [...]

Brian Moschel and Justin Meyer of JavaScriptMVC have opened their Jabbify chat client into a general purpose Comet service called Jabbify. Some of their claims:

Automatic Scaling: Jabbify scales to thousands of users per domain with no additional maintenance on your part.
Instant setup: Download a script and you’re developing with Comet in 30 seconds or less.
Simple [...]

We recently posted on Atmosphere, a new framework designed to provide an abstraction layer over Comet back-ends for Java web applications. At a personal level, this comes at an interesting time as over in the Mozilla Labs we’re evaluating different Comet approaches for our upcoming collaboration release. As we looked at various options, we come [...]