Persistent Full Duplex Client-Server Connection via Web Socket
RIA is considered as one of the mostly particular to the modern Web feature, and often stands for the trend, according to which web-applications tend to desktop applications. Nonetheless the approach is very relative. Overwhelming majority of “rich” web-applications is still built on the “request-response” model. I.e. events of the client side can be reflected on the sever side, but not vice-versa. In order to make such a trivial thing as a chat, you have to go with tricks. There are different techniques to emulate bi-directional connections. Usually solutions of the kind are called Comet, thanks to Alex Russell of Dojo.