Lots has happened

The topic is really the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) which can now receive data asynchronously using XMLHttp objects in JavaScript (AJAX).

There are a few contenders:
1. Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Using Java on the server side and for design time.
2. Adobe FLEX which requires the Macromedia flash player. Here is a really cool application, from Google of all players, using FLEX. Looks like a neat trender.
3. Microsoft ATLAS which uses ASP.NET on the server and AJAX. So far all the controls I have seen make way to many trips to the server.
4. Microsfot Silverlight. This requires a plugin which loads a mini version of .NET on your browser. It run in Mac OSX and Linux and works with most browsers not, just IE. Maybe this why Apple is now offering Safari on Windows. Silverlight puts Vista-like presentation into the browsers.
5. Various Javascript frameworks such as Prototype. Most of them make use of JSON which encodes the data in Javascript objects versus XML. It is faster.

All this to be real-time and scalable requires that the data be published using techniques such as publisher/subscriber. HTTP by default is not that way. So enter the COMET technique. I am working on getting this working in .NET using HTTPHandler (.ashx) pages. More to come later.