JavaScript: Firefox/Aurora 6 and EventSource API

I originally wrote this as a comment on Mozilla’s “Aurora 6 Is Here” article – but I’m impatient and couldn’t wait for the comment to be moderated. Also, I haven’t posted in a while and figured Bob the Rooster would appreciate it.

Glad to see support for the EventSource API has made it to Firefox.

There is a major flaw in all existing implementations in that they do not actually open a “listener” for some sort of event that is generated and sent from the server. What has actually been implemented is the equivalent to a native polling mechanism, which is useful none-the-less.

Last fall I released a test supported (unit and spec tests) jQuery extension that provides a unified API (using XHR as fallback). https://github.com/rwldrn/jquery.eventsource

Additionally, I’ve created these useful EventSource API tests, snippets and demos:

Serializing Array to JSON data: https://gist.github.com/415294

Echo serialized GET params: https://gist.github.com/415836

Sending GET params: https://gist.github.com/415836

I have a number of other gists: https://gist.github.com/gists/search?q=eventsource&page=1

A quickstart guide to EventSource: http://stage1.bocoup.com/blog/chrome-6-server-sent-events-with-new-eventsource

An article I wrote about creating EventSource from WebWorker threads: http://stage1.bocoup.com/blog/javascript-creating-an-eventsource-within-a-worker

A mini-web-chat written with EventSource: http://stage1.bocoup.com/blog/jquery-eventsource-yakyakface-com & http://yakyakface.com

Now that Firefox, Chrome and Opera have implemented the EventSource API, I think it’s a safe and viable addition to our development tool kits.