Four Island

Okay. I have big news. INSTADISC IS BACK. Well, it's coming back. After a half year hiatus while I felt sorry for myself (and worked on FourPuzzle which I never posted about), I finally thought of something. A way for InstaDisc to work.

I seem to recall InstaDisc dying because it's Push notification only worked for a VERY small number of people (a.k.a. just me) and without Push, InstaDisc was pretty much a highly convoluted RSS replacement. However, my work on FourChat, the Yaplet replacement that never really surfaced, led me to realize an alternative to server push.

REVERSE AJAX.

Okay, it's not actually Reverse AJAX as I'm not using JavaScript, it's Comet. But I like calling it Reverse AJAX. Anyway, Comet is the way! I have been rewriting the InstaDisc Central Server in C++ and Comet seems to work perfectly. Yayfulness.

So, you may be wondering, when will InstaDisc be completed? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am actually already nearly done with Central. There are only 3 API functions that I haven't yet implemented and after that, there's just the testing period.

The bad news is, along with Comet, the InstaDisc specification has changed. A lot. Because of this, the Client will have to be majorly rewritten. I'm thinking of scraping the original code and staring over in C++. So that will probably take a while. Plus, the Update Servers will also have to be rewritten, but that's not much of a problem as they're small.

So, InstaDisc is back. YAY.

Oh, and by the way, Ohats Is So Dead.