I don't pretend to understand the technology of one part of this, but I do recognise that the potential for applications such as online banking are amazing. This is because the Bank can anticipate the users steps, and have the data/ functions ready for the user when they click. If done right this can eliminate latency; translation almost instant response to users clicks.

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The architecture relies on a view of data which is event driven on both sides of the HTTP connection. Engineers familiar with SOA or message oriented middleware will find this diagram to be amazingly familiar. The only substantive change is that the endpoint is the browser.While Comet is similar to Ajax in that it�s asynchronous, applications that implement the Comet style can communicate state changes with almost negligible latency. This makes it suitable for many types of monitoring and multi-user collaboration applications which would otherwise be difficult or impossible to handle in a browser without plugins.