We've got an old web UI wherein part of it polls an appliance via AJAX to get the results of long-running commands, so the progress and stdout/stderr of the commands can be displayed to the user. It just does a request every few seconds to get whatever new output is available; no rocket science here.
Now, years later, we're refactoring all its web UIs. That got me wondering, "surely others do this kind of thing all the time - there's got to be an RFC for it". I went digging around but came up empty handed.
Is there already a standard that describes a popular manner for doing this short-polling? (and what is/are these standards?)
It would be implementation independent, just describing the protocol, as a subset of HTTP. For example, are requests done with GET or POST or PUT; what HTTP status codes are used to indicate job status (queued, running, aborted, done, etc), or is this done with response headers, and what name was given to these headers; or do we send client info in query params or headers or body content, ...?
There's so many different ways this can be done, I thought it would be nice to do it the common way.
