This is the most useful HTML5 feature for me yet. I used it for the web interface for the telepresence robot I and my friend built. Can't wait to try out iOS Safari's accelerometer support.

Now if only the majority of people use a browser that supports Websockets maybe it'll become actually useful.

That's why Socket.IO is great: http://socket.io/

It gives you the same API as you'd want from a websockets library, but it will fall back to Flash Sockets, long polling, etc. if websockets aren't available.

It was originally written for node, but there's a Python implementation now too.

Thanks a lot for that, I was going to start writing my own version next week for a new project. I looked on the page and Googled a bit, but I couldn't find the Python implementation. Do you have a link for that?

It's a very personal project. I wrote it so that at least two people in the world can be supported at this point - me and my friend with the latest build of WebKit browsers :-)

Of course, I went with Socket.IO - so that covers more than the two of us. Yay!

EDIT: Well, if you're a rubyist. EventMachine does a good job serverside, btw.

Seriously... it's 2010 and simple 2 way persistent communication seems like a hack on top of a cludge... I blame the browsers.

If you regard how much hassle you have to go through to make to browsers align a couple of images correctly in the same manner, I think the excitement about this kind of feature is warranted (provided it will work in every browser...)

"Bringing Sockets to the Web" the title is a "bit" misleading.