Stargate is a package for adding WebSockets support to pyramid applications using the excellent eventlet library for long running connections

From wikipedia:

WebSockets is a technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex
communications channels, over a single TCP socket

The WebSocket protocol provides a persistent low latency, low complexity way to achieve two way communication from the browser to server.

From a client point of view using websocket is very simple:

var ws = new WebSocket('ws://somehost/some/url');
ws.onopen = function(msg){
    //do some cool setup
}
ws.onmessage = function(msg){
    //do something cool
}
ws.onclose = function(msg){
    //do some clean up... stay cool
}

// later:
ws.send('How cool am I?!');

That's pretty much all there is to it.

Normally the websocket communication in a web app is implemented as a stand alone server (perhaps running on a different port). rpz.websocket allows you to connect persistent connection directly to the same objects that serve your HTML.

Documentation is maintained at http://boothead.github.com/stargate