Building the Realtime User Experience

Integrating Cometd into Your Infrastructure

So far, we’ve seen a fairly interesting example of how Bayeux and Cometd change things for both users and developers. This is great stuff, but unless you’re starting a project from scratch, there is a good chance that these examples have used different technologies than your existing infrastructure. Moving over all of your existing code doesn’t make a lot of sense. The good news is that incorporating this into a standard web environment is remarkably easy.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll demonstrate how to set this up with Apache’s httpd server, which is extremely popular and runs on just about every platform. This idea should work on most other server platforms as well; you’ll just need to use their configuration methods.

On Apache, you’ll need to install the proxy module if it’s not installed already. If you installed Apache through your operating system’s package manager, you should be able to install it that way. On Ubuntu, this should do the trick: sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-proxy-html. If you compiled Apache from source, this is as simple as reconfiguring with --enable-proxy=shared and recompiling.

You’ll also need to update your httpd.conf file to load the proxy module. To do that, add the following lines near any other LoadModule statements:

LoadModule proxy_module           modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module      modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module   modules/mod_proxy_connect.so

Now, before you restart ...