Question

I have a server at http://foobar that returns a JSON object containing information about things that happened in the past second, e.g., something like

{
    time: 2011-06-08 05:07:33,
    total: 235324,
    average: 1233
}

What’s the best way to poll this server so that I get every update? I’m guessing I don’t want to just poll the server, sleep for 1 second, and then poll again (since the polling might take some time and cause things to get delayed, so I might miss some updates). Should I do something instead like sleep for only 0.5 seconds, poll the server, and then check whether the JSON object I receive has a different timestamp from the last JSON I received?

(I’m doing this in Java, by the way, though I don’t think the language really matters.)

Answer 1

If you need to get every update, the server should be pushing the updates to you instead of going the other direction.

For example, you should look into setting up a stream between the client and server so that the server can send event notifications to the client.