It seems like I just started Orbited yesterday, though in reality I started prototyping it about a year ago. A lot has happened since then and when I step back and look at the website and the project as a whole, I’m very pleased.

I’ve been sticking with low version numbers because I only want adventurous developers who are interested in pushing the boundaries of the web, but don’t mind tracking down a bug or two. In my mind its a small price to pay. Of course, 95% of developers aren’t interested in the least — They’ll adopt once the technology works flawlessly. At this point, I’m pleased to announce that We’ll soon be switching to 0.2.0 development in the repository. If there’s any new functionality you want, now’s the time to say so.

Before 0.2.0 work commences, I want to catch every type of error possible and provide a meaningful report in the error log. The Catch-all functions fine, but its not nice to see cryptic tracebacks all the time. So hopefully over the next couple weeks you’ll know exactly what goes wrong when something breaks.

I also think that Orbited is stable enough for real use. I’m not going to quite call it production ready, but I personally am confident enough to use it in production. The big problem now is opening Orbited up to a wider array of communities. At the moment we only have a functioning python and ruby Orbited client. We need to actively recruit developers from the following languages:

• PHP
• Perl
• Java
• C#/.net

If we have simple chat tutorials for all of these major languages, then we’d be ready to start getting some coverage on ajaxian and other similar sites. There’s only so much the core development team can do, particularly because our skill set is slanted towards C, python, and Java. There are so many application developers out there who use PHP that we cannot ignore them and consider ourselves a serious contender in the space of comet servers.

But Orbited itself is ready for the next set of developers, the slightly less adventurous kind. To that end, we are going to start publicizing Orbited on various developer mailing lists and irc channels. I recently submitted an abstract to the AjaxWorld Conference, as did Jacob. If accepted, I will talk on the share-nothing architecture of Orbited, and the difficulties of scaling pubsub Comet architectures. Jacob will present on Orbited from a more practical standpoint — how to use it to easily create real-time applications.

This is an exciting time, and it’s only going to get better. Twenty years from now all of these problems will be gone — boring old news. But right now we are poised to invent solutions and really push the envelope. That’s exciting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.