Question

I need to find a way to update a web App implemented with backbone.

The use case will be the following:
I have several Views, and each View, or maybe model/collection related to this view,
needs to make different polling request to the server at different time for discovering some change.

I am wondering what is the most general way to:

1) implement the Traditional Polling Request
2) implement the Long Polling Request
3) implement the HTML5 web socket

---

P.S.:
1) The server is written in PHP.
2) For now I am looking for a solution without using HTML5 WebSockets because maybe with PHP is not so simple.

---

Here’s my simple code (1) using Traditional Polling Request.

(1)

// MyModel
var MyModel = Backbone.View.extend({
    urlRoot: 'backendUrl'
});

// MyView
var MyView = Backbone.View.extend({

    initialize: function () {
        this.model = new MyModel();
        this.model.fetch();
        this.model.on('change', this.render);
        setTimeout(function () {
            this.model.fetch();
        }, 1000 * 60 * 2); // in order to update the view each two minutes
    }
});

---

Answer 1

Implement it in your Model the polling handler, check this example:

// MyModel
var MyModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
  urlRoot: 'backendUrl',

  //Add this to your model:
  longPolling : false,
  intervalMinutes : 2,
  initialize : function(){
    _.bindAll(this);
  },
  startLongPolling : function(intervalMinutes){
    this.longPolling = true;
    if( intervalMinutes ){
      this.intervalMinutes = intervalMinutes;
    }
    this.executeLongPolling();
  },
  stopLongPolling : function(){
    this.longPolling = false;
  },
  executeLongPolling : function(){
    this.fetch({success : this.onFetch});
  },
  onFetch : function () {
    if( this.longPolling ){
      setTimeout(this.executeLongPolling, 1000 * 60 * this.intervalMinutes); // in order to update the view each N minutes
    }
  }
});

// MyView
var MyView = Backbone.View.extend({

    initialize: function () {
        this.model = new MyModel();
        this.model.startLongPolling();
        this.model.on('change', this.render);
    }
});