Comet describes a number of techniques with which a web server may push information to a client in a non-transactional format. Long Polling is one of such techniques, in which a browser’s request remains open until the server has information to send.

Long Polling is particularly useful in semi-synchronous applications, such as chat rooms and turn-based games, and is straightforward to implement with PHP and jQuery:

Hark not, the lack of updates on the Legends of Aesthir project does not mean progress has halted, only briefly paused (mostly on account of Skyrim). In retrospect, having set a hard deadline for completion of the minimum viable product was unwise, since I had little room to play with either the scope or the timeline (and, as with anything fairly complex, something always has to give).

In any case, these are the items from the roadmap that I managed to complete:

Whereas the focus in the past few weeks has been in tightening up the interface, the focus for the coming weeks will be on getting Legends of Aesthir to a playable state.

With the latest design and UI update to Legends of Aesthir comes the opening of registrations for the playable game. The registration is, at the moment, a means of collecting the information of prospective alpha testers, but, as you can see by the presence of the login area, development continues steadily!

Legends of Aesthir is a web-based, collectible-card game I’ve been working on for the past few months. Development progress has been fairly quiet so far, but that is about to change with the latest interface redesign, with which I am extremely happy!

Although my preferred JavaScript framework is jQuery, I’ve been using YUI 3 professionally quite a bit in the last months. Recently, I had the need to handle multiple concurrent AJAX calls and bind them to their own event handlers. This can be accomplished with:

Eons ago, in a long-fotgotten era that some call “the nineties”, I had my first exposure to a programming language. mIRC, the internet relay chat client for Windows, included a feature-rich scripting language that allowed you to not only customize the interface or have user events trigger custom functionality, but to develop entirely unrelated applications parsed, interpreted, and executed by the mIRC “virtual machine”. Aesthir was born.