Re: PP8: Asynchronous change notification for HTTP-based resources

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

Simon Leinen wrote:
>> Asynchronous change notification for HTTP-based resources
>> Rohan Mahy
> [...]
>> Current practices in change notification involve polling individual
>> HTTP resources, or polling some kind of HTTP "catalog" resource to
>> see what resources have changed. Both of these methods inherently
>> suck.  The "catalog" approach at least substantially reduces the
>> number of resources that need to be polled, but the amount of time
>> to wait between polls is always one-sided compromise and rarely
>> optimal for response time, network usage, and battery life.
> 
> FYI, there are a few interesting techniques to make server-to-client
> notifications over HTTP more efficient.  The buzzword for this is
> "Comet", and the Wikipedia article has good descriptions on some of
> these techniques, e.g. "long polling":
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

In the XMPP community we have developed a technology called BOSH, which 
has some similarities to the Comet approach. BOSH was originally 
developed as a method for XMPP servers to offer an HTTP transport for 
XMPP traffic instead of the TCP transport defined in RFC 3920, but we 
have generalized it so that it is no longer specific to XMPP:

http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html

We've talked about contributing this to the Internet Standards Process 
but haven't gotten around to it yet...

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/