Is there a real server push over http?

Question

I know there are ways to fake it, polling (or long polling) but is there any way to have the server contact the browser to push out information?

Either polling optio

Answer 1

You don't need to "fake" anything. Flash has a really nice and well fleshed out Socket object that works brilliantly, and you can write a tiny little Flash app that talks out to the web page, so you don't have to do anything in Flash other than the communication with the server (if you would prefer to build the page in HTML). You'll need a server side socket listener, of course, but those are pretty easy to throw together as well. Lots of documentation on-line for how to implement the whole thing.... Here's the first example I found (didn't look it over too closely, but looks like it would work nicely). http://www.giantflyingsaucer.com/blog/?p=205