CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpchatpolling
DevAlien
DevAlien

Reputation: 2476

Web chat Long polling or another method?

I'm working on a web chat with xmpp. At the moment I used a long polling, but is it the best method to do it? the server side is in PHP, with other languages maybe there are better solutions but with PHP?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 897

Answers (2)

Nidhin David
Nidhin David

Reputation: 2474

You can use web sockets or server-side-events. But these technologies only work for modern browsers.

Upvotes: 0

stslavik
stslavik

Reputation: 3028

This is a pretty common debate, and one to which there are numerous answers, dependent upon your server's capabilities and your constraints with licensing.

Essentially, the short answer right now is a library, like Node.js – this essentially handles the client-server relationship issues for you (determining availability of web sockets, flash, and falling back to AJAX long polling).

The long answer is that, with the state of browser adoption as it is, you have to account for numerous different contingencies – Do I want to require a technology, do I want to exclude certain groups, is it cost effective to develop a solution for groups X, Y, and Z? Then to cover all possibilities for the greatest efficiency server-side, you need to serve a sockets server of some kind, then client-side offer AJAX, Flash, and web sockets (possibly even Java to capture that last 1%). Ultimately, it boils down to who it's worth supporting (in an enterprise environment, you know the overall capabilities of the end users and can insist on one protocol; open web, you can't make those same assumptions).

Upvotes: 1

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