How does GMail implement Comet?
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by Morgan Cheng
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or by Morgan Cheng
Published on 2010-03-20T02:39:57Z
Indexed on
2010/03/20
2:41 UTC
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With the help of HttpWatch, I tried to figure out how GMail implement Comet.
I Login in GMail with two account, one in IE and the other in Firefox. Chatting in GTalk in GMail with some magic words like "WASSUP". Then, I logoff both GMail accounts, filter any http content without "WASSUP" string. The result shows which HTTP request is the streaming channel. (Note: I have to logoff. Otherwise, never-ending HTTP would not show content in HttpWatch.)
The result is interesting. The URL for stream channel is like:
There is no surprise that GMail do Comet in IE with IFRAME. The Http content starts with "
Originally, I guessed that GMail do Comet in Firefox with multipart XmlHttpRequest. To my surprise, the response header doesn't have "multipart/x-mixed-replace" header. The response headers are as below:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:52:39 GMT
X-Frame-Options: ALLOWALL
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Server: GSE
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Unfortunately, the HttpWatch doesn't tell whether a HTTP request is from XmlHttpRequest or not. The content is not HTML but JSON. It looks like a response for XHR, but that would not work for Comet without multipart/x-mixed-replace, right?
Is there any way else to figure out how GMail implement Comet?
Thanks.
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