The alternative to polling would be to have the server notify the browser that the data has changed. Here is one way to do it: The browser can do an HTTP GET and have a thread block on it -- later when the server has new data it sends the notification as a response to this GET. This way you are not polling over the network.
I had thought about this but the problem is i have set timeouts for my requests to only a few minutes because i wanted to prevnt DOS attacks as best i could without timing out to early (as there is some upload functionality).
Also i had 2 other problems which i thought may arise which kind of moved me away from trying to do it this way.
The first was if we start to get significant hits i think there would be a limit to the number of FD's i could have open on a single server and having the connection open continuously as it waits would slowly eat away at the number of FD's i would have available. Some people may leave the browser logged in and walk away (though i guess after a certain amount of inactivity you could just logout for them)
The second is, i have noticed using cherrypy the ajax requests are processed in sequance so im not sure that if i have a blocked request, whether it would hold up other requests for that session however if the blocking was in another thread it should work i think.
Maybe when i finally release my product and i start working on this functionality for V2 i will look more closely and give this an actual try instead of just thinking through it.
Hmmm, some things to try there ...
Thanks for your inputs mate.
