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I have to develop a multiple users chat application (like msn). I don’t what to use any framework to build it because I want to learn how those things work.
I am developing it in Delphi or C# but it does not really matter. What matter is that the chat client is going to be an app, not a browser.
The question is: what is the best way of handling messages between the clients?
So far, I know those techniques:
Pushlet
Polling
Long polling
Link to the Wikipedia
Do you need to support (tens of) thousands of simultanous connections? If yes, I recommend to take a look at
which are used in application servers and standards like Servlet 3.0 to minimize the number of worker threads and speed up network operation
There is a IOCP library for Delphi – see Is there a I/O completion port based component for Delphi?
Also HTTP could be used as the internal protocol, the new Microsoft http.sys library provides a great foundation and is included with new versions of Windows.
To give an impression how efficient messaging servers can be: on relatively modest hardware, the open source ActiveMQ Apollo server can handle 1.2 million messages per second. (It is written in Java)