New tool from Weelya provides real-time data for websites

Weelya announced its Ajax Push Engine (APE) 1.0 as a part of its real-time web paradigm campaign earlier this month. APE is an open source technology that pushes data onto websites as it becomes available, aka in “real-time”.

The APE was developed to be an effective solution to the old school paradigm of that limits web browsers to requesting the current data set from a web server on an irregular basis. The Ajax Push Engine solves this problem, which places contining stress on a server’s load and delivers data that quickly becomes outdated. The APE provides the data to the client (browser) directly, without requiring any additional software such as Active-X components, Java applets or Flash applications.

John Chavarria, of the open source Weelya startup group, stated that the APE essentially delivers a permanent AJAX request to the server, which is what is behind the delivery of the real-time data. It uses its own server, called Comet, which is used in conjunction with the traditional web server.

The APE software is currently available for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X web servers, which leaves Microsoft IIS developers out in the cold for the time being. This release supports 100,000 concurrent users, however, so it remains to be seen whether developers will consider this technology useful enough to make the switch from IIS.