Q: What is Stream?
A: Stream is a data communications platform for the Web 2.0. Stream takes the concepts of ajax and adds true push support through the utilization of a custom socket server, web service platform, and client interface libraries. Stream enables developers to create data driven and extremely low latency user interfaces.

Q: How does Stream work?
A: Stream works by scripting a Macromedia Flash XmlSocket object through a technology called liveconnect. But thats really just the surface. Stream is a platform, including tools to integrate this push technology with your development workflow. It also provides a SOAP-enabled server that can handle complex scaling scenarios where traditional http push techniques cannot.

Q: How is Stream different than AJAX
A: Ajax (Asyncronous JavaScript and XML) is a request-response architecture. If you wanted to do say, a chat solution in ajax you would have to poll the server continuously with a datagram equivilent to 'are there any new messages waiting for me'. Because you cannot scale an application that creates a request every 100 milliseconds, most ajax applications must delay this polling somewhere between 5 and 7 seconds to get a reasonable scalibility. Because Stream is a push technology, no polling is done. The Stream server will notify the client when a message is received. This notification will be immediate, with latency below 100 milliseconds. Because of this extremely low latency, new applications are possible, for example co-browsing or whiteboard sharing where low-latency real-time communications between clients is required.