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Without polling how does the Flex application receive push notices?

Nigel Gossage
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1 Answers1

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I assume Tweetdeck didn't do push notifications. I assumed it made API calls on a timer. When I have Tweetdeck and ServiceCapture up at the same time, tweetdeck sure does send a lot of traffic. I assume it is server pings looking for more data to retrieve.

That said, to do push notifications You need a socket server; so that the client is perpetually connected to the server. A few options for servers that support this are Adobe's LiveCycle, BlazeDS, GraniteDS, or WebORB.

I understand that GraniteDS uses a technique called long polling. BlazeDS uses the same approach. LiveCycle--and I believe WebORB--can use RTMP to do push notifications.

JeffryHouser
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  • GraniteDS and BlazeDS does long polling. I have "insider" information that Granite is currently working on real pushing (RTMP). LiveCycle does long polling and RTMP. In this particular case, I'm fairly sure that Tweetdeck is just doing regular interval polling since the Twitter API is all regular web services. – J_A_X Jun 03 '11 at 13:37
  • @J_A_X Here is a good blog post on BlazeDS's push technology support; basically verifying what you said. http://www.aaronwest.net/blog/index.cfm/2008/5/21/The-Truth-About-BlazeDS-and-Push-Messaging – JeffryHouser Jun 03 '11 at 14:02
  • I'm pretty sure Tweetdeck does push for the 'All Friends' column. Try posting a tweet with another twitter client and watch how quickly it appears in Tweetdeck. Other Twitter searchers do appear to be on a Timer pointing at search.twitter.com. – Nigel Gossage Jun 03 '11 at 14:18
  • Actually, after doing a bit of research, you're right Nigel. Twitter used to be a fully REST api only with 150 max requests per hour, but has recently changed it to also have a push messaging system. Please look it over on the [twitter dev site](http://dev.twitter.com). I'm fairly sure they're using long polling for this. – J_A_X Jun 03 '11 at 14:34
  • Thanks for the info :) I wasn't wanting to get instant tweets I was just using Tweetdeck as an example as it's close to what I wanted to achieve with Flex. We seem to have cracked our problem using http://www.pusher.com/ one thing to note though is that you can't host the js file locally within the flex (air) application as the html object would be sandboxed. – Nigel Gossage Jun 10 '11 at 09:52