Real time web site using PHP or ASP.NET

Question

Hey Guys,

I'm looking for a way to put real time features into my web site.

The idea is asynchronous communication between 2 people - like a chat session. If I use the chat example - I'd like the second person to know that the first one has sent a message to him, without refreshing or doing something active on the web page.

Polling is not a good idea here - so is there any other solution? the back-end could be ASP.NET or PHP (ASP.NET preferred).

Help would be much appreciated,

Thanks,

Roman

Answer 1

You can use AJAX... So there is no difference whether you choose ASP.NET or PHP.

Answer 2

You might want to check out COMET, as opposed to AJAX, for something like a chat system. This is what is used by FriendFeed and others to avoid lots of polling requests.

I found this blog and this article that talks about it with ASP.NET

Answer 3

Well, PHP isn't really suited to the task. But then again, neither is ASP.net. The reason for it is how the server (IIS/Apache) deals with the request. The application (and the connection) will need to stay alive until there's data to send. That's VERY expensive for single request per thread/process applications.

One option, is to use a stand alone server for the long poll COMET requests. Python has one that's already written: Tornado. You just run that program (and write the code to send the data to the client) as a web server (You can run it on a separate port or proxy to it, so that regular requests are handled by your primary web server).