Meteoroid towards a real MVC for the web

Web development has moved from simple static pages to complex web applications, some of them resembling desktop ones. In most of these applications the web browser acts as thin-client (or a view) of the model that sits on the server. Despite the technological evolution of the web, there is still no standard mechanism to send data or events from the server to the client without an explicit request from the later, thus forcing the web browser to constantly poll the server for updates. To solve this problem a set of techniques under the name of Comet were proposed, allowing to send information from the server to the web browser without an explicit client request. In this paper we introduce Meteoroid, a Comet approach to make "live" Seaside applications. Our framework exploits the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm for building simple yet scalable web applications, requiring very little programming effort.