I ran across this article talking about the technical setup of Lingr (basically provides chat rooms in the browser). The interesting thing about Lingr is it uses a technology that keeps a connection open from the browser to the server. With this connection open, the server can push content to the browser without requiring a browser refresh or a "polling" of the server. This lead to comments about whether servers could handle that many open connections.
There were references to a few servers/modules that should be able to handle a number of open connections. Then there was a comment about Yet Another Webserver (Yaws). It is written in Erlang - a functional language designed for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. After seeing Bruce Tate demo Erlang at NFJS, I wasn't sure how it could be used. After looking at this, it seems like there might be a place for it even though I am still trying to understand Erlang.
If the server push type of development keeps increasing, we might see something like Yaws become a more common solution.
