Long polling - Message system

Question

I\'m looking into doing some long polling with jQuery and PHP for a message system. I\'m curious to know the best/most efficient way to achieve this. I\'m basing is off this Sim

Answer 1

Yes the way that you describe it is how the Long Polling Method is working generally. Your sample code is a little vague, so i would like to add that you should do a sleep() for a small amount of time inside the while loop and each time compare the last_checked time (which is stored on server side) and the current time (which is what is sent from the client's side).

Something like this:

$current = isset($_GET['timestamp']) ? $_GET['timestamp'] : 0;
$last_checked = getLastCheckedTime(); //returns the last time db accessed

while( $last_checked <= $current) {
    usleep(100000);
    $last_checked = getLastCheckedTime();
}

$response = array();
$response['latestData'] = getLatestData() //fetches all the data you want based on time
$response['timestamp'] = $last_checked;
echo json_encode($response);    

And at your client's side JS you would have this:

function longPolling(){
        $.ajax({
          type : 'Get',
          url  : 'data.php?timestamp=' + timestamp,
          async : true,
          cache : false,

          success : function(data) {
                var jsonData = eval('(' + data + ')');
                //do something with the data, eg display them
                timestamp  = jsonData['timestamp'];
                setTimeout('longPolling()', 1000);
          },
          error : function(XMLHttpRequest, textstatus, error) { 
                    alert(error);
                    setTimeout('longPolling()', 15000);
          }     
       });
}