i want to create a web chat/forum application that is google wave alike.
when one person is typing a new post or embed an image in it other persons are seeing this live.
i have read about different techniques and i feel that long polling and iframe are the most talked about.
so, which one should i use for this application and why? i’ve read something about that the long polling is great for long update intervals. cause if it’s a chat, then it has to request new data for every keystroke..and that is like polling every second when typing. so based on this, i should use iframe so that there is only one connection all the time?
what technology is meebo/google wave using?
Long polling sounds like a good choice for this kind of application, but you might want to consider having some kind of delay/buffer period between key stroke and server callbacks. It doesn’t have to be very long (less than a second) to give a serious speed gain.
You might also want to consider using Adobe Flash as a bridge between the client side javascript and your own custom communication protocol. This offers better control and less overhead, but comes with the price of a client side plugin dependency.
Last, but not at least, you might want to consider building your application on top of Google Wave. Unless your are building a clone of Wave for the sake of building a clone, it might provide you with a lot of the infrastructure you need.
I’d hate to sound harsh, but I think you might need to dig a bit deeper into the subject, and return when you have a more tangible question.