'Web' based push notifications for internal-only application - javascript

I'm already tossing around a solution but as I haven't done something like this before I wanted to check what SO thought before implementation.
Basically I need to modify an existing web based application that has approximately 20 users to add push notifications. It is important that the users get the notifications at the same time (PC-A shouldn't get an alert 20 seconds before PC-B). Currently the system works off of AJAX requests, sending to the server every 20 seconds and requesting any updates and completely rebuilding the table of data each time (even if data hasn't changed). This seems really sloppy so there's two methods I've come up with.
Don't break the connection from server-client. This idea I'm tossing around involves keeping the connection between server and client active the entire time. Bandwidth isn't really an issue with any solution as this is in an internal network for only approximately 20 people. With this solution the server could push Javascript to the client whenever there's an update and modify the table of data accordingly. Again, it's very important that every connected PC receives the updates as close to the same time as possible. The main drawback to this is my experience, I've never done it before so I'm not sure how well it'd work or if it's just generally a bad idea.
Continue with the AJAX request, but only respond in intervals. A second solution I've thought of would be to allow the clients to make AJAX requests as per usual (currently every 20 seconds) but have the server only respond in 30 second intervals (eg 2:00:00 and 2:00:30 regardless of how many AJAX requests it recieves in that span of time). This would require adjusting the timeout for the AJAX request to prevent the request timing out, but it sounds okay in theory, at least to me.
This is for an internal network only, so bandwidth isn't the primary concern, more so that the notification is received as close to each other as possible. I'm open to other ideas, those are just the two that I have thought of so far.
Edit
Primarily looking for pros and cons of each approach. DashK has another interesting approach but I'm wondering if anyone has experience with any of these methods and can attest to the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, or possibly another method.

If I understand well your needs I think you should take a look to Comet
Comet is a web application model in which a long-held HTTP request allows a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it. Comet is an umbrella term, encompassing multiple techniques for achieving this interaction. All these methods rely on features included by default in browsers, such as JavaScript, rather than on non-default plugins.
The Comet approach differs from the original model of the web, in which a browser requests a complete web page at a time.

How about using an XMPP server to solve the problem?
Originally designed to be an Instant Messaging platform, XMPP is a messaging protocol that enables users in the system to exchange messages. (There's more to this - But let's keep it simple.)
Let's simplify the scenario a little bit. Imagine the following:
You're a system admin. When the system
has a problem, you need to let all the
employees, about 20 of them, know that
the system is down.
In the old days, every employee will
ask you, "Is the system up?" every
hour or so, and you'll response
passively. While this works, you are
overloaded - Not by fixing system
outage, but by 20 people asking for
system status every hour.
Now, AIM is invented! Since every
employee has access to AIM, you
thought, "Hey, how about having every
single one of them join a 'System
Status' chat room, and I'll just send
a message to the room when the system
is down (or is back)?" By doing so,
employees who are interested in
knowing system status will simply join
the 'System Status' room, and will be
notified of system status update.
Back to the problem we're trying to solve...
System admin = "System" who wants to notify the web app users.
Employees = Web app users who wants to receive notification.
System Status chat room = Still, system Status chat room
When web app user signs on to your web app, make the page automatically logs them onto the XMPP server, and join the system status chat room.
When system wants to notify the user, write code to logon to the XMPP server, join the chat room, and broadcast a message to the room.
By using XMPP, you don't have to worry about:
Setting up "Lasting connection" - Some open source XMPP server, eJabberd/OpenFire, has built-in support for BOSH, XMPP's implementation of the Comet model.
How the message is delivered
You however will need the following:
Find a Javascript library that can help you to logon to an XMPP server. (Just Google. There're a lot.)
Find a XMPP library for the server-side code. (XMPP library exists for both Java & C#. But I'm not sure what system you're using behind the scene.)
Manually provision each user on the XMPP server (Seems like you only have 20 people. That should be easy - However, if the group grows bigger, you may want to perform auto-provisioning - Which is achievable through client-side Javascript XMPP library.)
As far as long-lasting AJAX calls, this implementation is limited by the at-most-2-connection-to-the-same-domain issue. If you used up one connection for this XMPP call, you only have 1 more connection to perform other AJAX calls in the web-app. Depending on how complex your webapp is, this may or may not be desirable, since if 2 AJAX calls have already been made, any subsequent AJAX call will have to wait until one of the AJAX pipeline freed up, which may cause "slowness" on your app.
You can fix this by converting all AJAX calls into XMPP messages, and have a bot-like user on the server to listen to those messages, and response to it by, say, sending back HTML snippets/JSON objects with the data. This however might be too much for what you're trying to achieve.
Ahh. Hope this makes sense... or not. :p

See http://ajaxpatterns.org/HTTP_Streaming
It allows You to push data from the server when server wants it. Not just after the query.
You could use this technique without making large changes to the current application, and synchronize output by the time on the server.

In addition to the other two great options above, you could look at Web Workers if you know they have latest Chrome, Safari, FF, or Opera for a browser.
A Worker has the added benefit of not operating in the same thread as the rest of the page, so performance will be better. The downside is that, for security purposes, you can only send string data between the two scripts and the worker does not have window or document context. However, JSON can be represented as a string, so there's really no limit to the data.
Workers can receive data multiple times and asynchronously. You set the onmessage handler to act each time it receives something.

If you can ask every user to use a specific browser (Latest Safari or Chrome), you can try WebSockets too.

Related

Bidirectional server/client communication in JavaScript and PHP

I want to create a multiplayer game using JavaScript (no jQuery) and PHP, where most of the mechanics use AJAX calls. However, I need to determine when a user has left the game to update the player status on other players' screens (I assume by regular AJAX requests?). Also, once all players have left the game files (.txts) on the server need to be deleted.
I am using a free web hosting service which means I can't use WebSockets or cron jobs. I also don't want to use Node.js. Most of what I have read advise regularly timestamping with PHP sessions and this is fine, but I would like to know how to then check to see if the user/game has been inactive for a period of time.
Also, using window.onbeforeunload is too unreliable, in case browsers crash etc.
Don't use the wrong tool for the job.
Any kind of AJAX-based solution you attempt for this purpose is likely to very be inefficient, or unreliable, or probably both. If you have more than a tiny number of concurrent users, the sheer volume of AJAX requests would be likely to overwhelm the server and potentially bust your monthly quota. And as you've discovered, determining when someone has ended their session by closing the browser window is not straightforward or reliable. I would advise against any such architecture.
Websockets is really the correct solution for real-time or near-real-time updates between client and server (and vice versa). It'a also easy for the socket server to know when someone has disconnected (which would occur if they close the window/tab).
So you could either upgrade your hosting so you're able to run a websocket server successfully, or try to integrate a websocket based solution hosted elsewhere, e.g. Azure SignalR or some similar product (I am not making specific recommendations in an answer, as that's regarded as off-topic).
use an interval function and ping the php endpoint every second.
If it stops the User is out

If i used setInterval to request data from database, May it damage the server?

I'm trying to develop chat system in php, sql and ajax. I created function by ajax to get messages from database this function its event when window upload, so if i open 2 windows in browser to test the application, I found the messages bu when i send message it appear in just the window which send from not both of the 2 windows. To solve this problem i used setInterval function every 1 second to show messages.
Do this huge requests damage the server ??
I don't quite know what you meant with "Damage", but nothing can be really damaged by a few extra requests.
If you're wondering whether the webserver can handle the load, it really depends on how many chat sessions are going at the same time. Any decent web server should be able to handle a lot more than two requests per second. If you have thousands of chat sessions open, or you have very CPU intensive code, then you may notice issues.
A bigger issue may be your network latency. If your network takes more than a second for a round-trip communication with the server, then you may end up with multiple requests coming from the same client at the same time.

Should I track who to send notifications to when using websockets or send to all users?

I am working on a web application where users have to log in (which gives me a handle that I can track them by in the websocket server) and am wondering whether it is worth it to track them or not. I need to send out a notification to make changes to the home page only if they are on that page. Would it be better to maintain a map of everyone who is on the home page and only send the notification to them, or send the notification to everyone and then have the javascript see if they are on the home page?
Thanks for any input!
Generally speaking, Websocket (and TCP/IP) Unicasting is less resource intensive than broadcasting.
TCP/IP doesn't really allow broadcasting, so broadcasting is implemented by iterating over the connections and sending each one a message (unicasting).
Having said that, the server's code might be better optimized than your own, so you might get better performance while broadcasting under some circumstances than if you iterated over the connections yourself to run some code on each one. This would be the exception rather than the rule.
Some websocket libraries in the wild have a PUB/SUB feature, which let you subscribe connections to a channel that you can publish specific content to.
Knowing whether or not such a feature runs well with respect to performance (etc.), would requires some research into the specific library.

Building a real time stock quotes application? (lots of XMLHttpRequest?)

I'm creating a personal application which displays stock quotes realtime (updating every second), and I was wondering what was the best way to approach this project?
I'm going to query using Yahoo YQL: example query.
I've been researching WebSockets and sockets.io, but I don't believe you can use this unless you own the server with the data. Is this approach not possible?
Send an XMLHttpRequest every second? This seems really bad for some reason, just seeing all the requests in the developer tools makes me cringe and my laptop heat up.
Any thoughts? I've heard of people using an iframe or something to make the requests?
I cannot for the love of programming figure out how Google and Yahoo do it.
An IFRAME that updates each second would have similar effect than an AJAX request every second. Some pages uses an IFRAME that refresh each X time, but there is no magic there, an IFRAME is like another browser window inside the web page.
You are right about websockets, the server must expose a websocket endpoint, otherwise is not possible. If you have this option, go for it.
There is other push technology named "Server Sent Events" (aka SSE, Event Source): http://caniuse.com/eventsource Again the server must expose it, but it basically allows the client to keep a persistent connection to the server, and this push events to the client. Again if you have this option, and websocket is not available, go for it.
If you are not in control of the server, and the only provided option is regular HTTP calls, I guess you have no other option. Please mind that some trading providers limit the amount of requests you can do per minute, or limit the amount of times the information changes per minute, so maybe doing one per second your are not achieving anything relevant... or you can get yourself banned.
I'm pretty new to javascript and API's but I think a google or yahoo API (Application Programming Interface) would be appropriate to link the stock quotes to your app.

Pushing notifications to a JavaScript?

I'm just wondering if there is a way to have a server push information to a JavaScript function. Essentially I have a Dashboard-type page that has a javaScript function to get updates from the server and update the dashboard.
I would like my server to be able to "ping" the JS.
I don't even know how that could be possible (I'm guessing Twitter and Facebook use polling?), but I'd thought I ask.
I heard of Comet, but I don't know if that works with a plain standard IIS 7 installation? (It's a SharePoint 2010 site if that matters in any way) If I understand it correctly, Comet is essentially a constantly open connection, so it seems like it's actually the opposite of what I want (reducing # of requests and therefore load)
If you're looking for a comet server for IIS, check out WebSync; it's exactly that :)
Truly initiating a connection from the server is not possible using HTTP. Comet isn't really a single technique, but a set of different workarounds (many of which are described at the article you linked).
For information on Comet techniques with IIS, see the prior question, Comet Programming in IIS. One of the programs discussed there is WebSync.
A Comet style workaround is the most common way to get this functionality. The connection is not constantly open, but rather throttled to make calls every x seconds, then try again upon timeout. The timeout essentially means that the server didn't have anything to give to the client in the duration of the poll. You'll see that the Etherpad code used this same approach, which has been integrated into other Google products now like Google Docs and Wave.
As Samuel Neff says, "You're going to need an open connect to "push" data from the server to the client."
You can use a service like pubnub to open persistent connections from the client and support fallbacks for older browsers.
I made a small demo to show you how the front-end of this application may work. The demo shows PubNub latency over time. The source is available here.
The browser subscribes to a channel and fires a callback when a message is received.
pubnub.subscribe({
channel: 'my_channel',
message: function(m){console.log(m)}
});
In the demo the client also publishes messages. In your case you would include the PubNub IIS library.
pubnub.Subscribe<string>(channel="mychannel", DisplaySubscribeReturnMessage, DisplaySubscribeConnectStatusMessage, DisplayErrorMessage);
// NOTE: DisplaySubscribeReturnMessage, DisplaySubscribeConnectStatusMessage and DisplayErrorMessage are callback methods
You're going to need an open connect to "push" data from the server to the client. So even if you went the route of using a plugin like Flash to open a socket connection which supports two-way communications, you have an open socket connection.
Your statement "reducing # of requests and therefore load" really is problematic. You're equating number of requests with load and that is not accurate. With Comet the majority of requests are waiting on data. Therefore you can have a very high number of requests, but really a very low load on the server--it's hardly using resources besides a waiting thread from the worker thread pool.
Use Comet. Works great, is simple to implement, and does exactly what you need.
You have to do it the other way around, by having the client "pinging" the server with JS.
You can do something like:
function pollServer()
{
// Get some parameter
var param = .......
AJAXCall("page.php?param="+param, onReturn);
}
function onReturn(response)
{
// do something with response
setTimeout("pollServer()", 5000);
}
pollServer();
AJAXCall being the function you use to do an AJAX call and that calls onReturn when it gets a response.
Once it gets a response it waits in this case 5 seconds and polls the server again

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