6 ms·
I found it interesting that this is ostensibly a notifications API, and nowhere is there any way to actually get notifications except by polling. I definitely u
by witten 14y ago
I found it interesting that this is ostensibly a notifications API, and nowhere is there any way to actually get notifications except by polling. I definitely understand why a push notification API would be a bad idea, but is polling with Last-Modified really the state of the art in notification APIs? What if you want to find out almost instantly when an event occurs, and not just at the granularity of your poll interval? At the API level, what do people use for this? Comet-style long polling? WebSockets? pubsubhubbub?
- technoweenie 14y agoThose are all good options, but you still need some kind of poll API. What happens if your PSHB endpoint is down for a bit? What if your streaming HTTP connection disconnects?
- witten 14y agoSure, polling suits a lot of use cases just fine. I'm just wondering about the ones it doesn't satisfy.
- ewolf 14y agoUnfortunately, almost no website has a push API for notifications (or anything else). In the app I mentioned below, I'm gathering notifications from Facebook, Forrst, StackExchange and unread emails from Gmail — I have to poll for every one of those.
- markoa 14y agoI think webhooks would be the simplest implementation.