Real-time chat with push notification
I am working on a private messasing functionality for my site, is there a way to get push notifications from the server, that the user has received a new message?
the only technique I know is to constantly poll the server via ajax to see if there are new messages, and reload the messenger window if needed.
thanks for any feedback!
UPD: so far the following directions have been identified:
1) Comet
2) BOSH - Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP
3) XMPP - this is what google talk is based on
Answer
You might want to look into XMPP and BOSH. Very comet like and ejabberd combined with nginx can maintain 1000's of connections on a very small box.
Take a look at one of my projects www.vooices.us to see what we have done with XMPP and BOSH.
http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master JQueryBosh - to enable quick and easy access to XMPP over HTTP
It is relativly easy to set up and install.
Paul.