Question

I have a Windows Service which receives data (every seconds) from an external componant.
I would like to display data received on a website (Asp.Net Web Application).
I want to use canvas from HTML5 and JQuery/Javascrpit to render the data received (synoptic for a production line).

My WebSite is already running and communicates with a WCF Service hosted by the Windows Service.

First question: is this a better way than pooling from client to get informations from server side? (Gmail, Facebook don’t use pooling I assume..)

Second question: which architecture and technologies should I use?
My solution is to create a WCF method which returns datas and the web site via pooling get informations calling the WCF methods (JSON protocols).

Is this a better way?

Answer 1

A good approach for your needs could be

1. having a background thread in your Application to call the WCF service every certain time,
2. if you need you can store that data in cache to avoid several roundtrips.
3. After your data is fetched you can use SignalR to broadcast the information to all your clients without the need to request it explicitly.

SignalR is really good because it has a fallback procedure, so it will use WebSockets from HTML5 if it can, otherwise it will use other methods to simulate the long-polling.