What's the best way for the client app to immediately react to an update in the database?

Question

What is the best way to program an immediate reaction to an update to data in a database?

The simplest method I could think of offhand is a thread that checks the databa

Answer 1

You basically have two issues here:

1. You want a browser to be able to receive asynchronous events from the web application server without polling in a tight loop.

2. You want the web application to be able to receive asynchronous events from the database without polling in a tight loop.

For Problem #1

See these wikipedia links for the type of techniques I think you are looking for:

• Comet
• Reverse AJAX
• HTTP Server Push

EDIT: 19 Mar 2009 - Just came across ReverseHTTP which might be of interest for Problem #1.

For Problem #2

The solution is going to be specific to which database you are using and probably the database driver your server uses too. For instance, with PostgreSQL you would use LISTEN and NOTIFY. (And at the risk of being down-voted, you'd probably use database triggers to call the NOTIFY command upon changes to the table's data.)

Another possible way to do this is if the database has an interface to create stored procedures or triggers that link to a dynamic library (i.e., a DLL or .so file). Then you could write the server signalling code in C or whatever.

On the same theme, some databases allow you to write stored procedures in languages such as Java, Ruby, Python and others. You might be able to use one of these (instead of something that compiles to a machine code DLL like C does) for the signalling mechanism.

Hope that gives you enough ideas to get started.