About the Author

Michael Oberg is a german mathematician and software developer; freelancer since the end of 2003 and author of two other open source projects: the myLinux server (http://www.mylinuxproject.de, a Linux small business server distribution build on top of Linux from Scratch), and kallcenter, a small (outbound only) callcenter application with a Linux (KDE) GUI client (see kde-apps.org too).

About the project

First ideas of the AjaxSync long polling mechanism were born in the middle of 2006, for a Computer Telephony Integration web interface requested by a partner. The name AjaxSync was inspired by Microsoft ActiveSync which uses long polling for the Push Mail feature of Microsoft Exchange.

The first real application using this technique was written in the middle of 2007, utilizing Posix pipes for delaying. Relying on the same idea, a variant of this was used for a web callback of a big german power reseller at the end of 2008. In 2009, there were plans made for a bigger web application for callcenters build on this technique, but were never realised.

However, the AjaxSync framework published on this site does not rely on Posix pipes, but on "normal" TCP/IP sockets, having in mind a future system independency on server side.