Until now, if you wanted hi-speed communication in IE6/IE7 you would have to resort to the NameTransport, but this has its drawbacks
- It makes a ‘rattling’ sound when it navigates the documents
- It requires a html-file, name.html, present on both of the servers.
Especially the last issue is a tough one, as many aren’t necessarily able to upload any files to the servers.
The good news
Thanks to Ivan Žužak (who also runs the pmrpc project), I became aware of the Shindig project, where a ‘new’ technique was mentioned, and so I decided to implement it. And so it comes to be that a new transport, the NixTransport is now available for IE6 & IE 7, a transport that uses shared memory (no queuing and fragmentation) and that uses as little as 10/15 ms transferring its messages.
This means that it is pretty much identical to the newer HTML5 postMessage transport.
I would really appreciate it if you would test this transport and give me some feedback (if works for you, or if it doesn’t) so that I can mark it as stable and release it.
Note, I have tested it in both IE6 and IE7, but who knows, there might be some variables unknown to me that might influence it.
It can be tested here http://easyxdm.net/dev/tests/ and if you want to, you can download using the following links
- http://easyxdm.net/dev/easyXDM.debug.js
- http://easyxdm.net/dev/easyXDM.js
- http://easyxdm.net/dev/easyXDM.min.js
And for those who wish to take a closer look at how it works, here you go http://github.com/oyvindkinsey/easyXDM/blob/master/src/stack/NixTransport.js
So again, please take some time to test this (those who are set up to test in IE6 and IE7) and report back, it would really help me.