Pat Maddox
4/2/2005 8:10:00 PM
Have you looked at Ajax? You could use that to take care of the
asynchronous messaging.
On Apr 2, 2005 12:54 PM, Joe Edelman <joe.edelman@gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to build an HTTP-based chat server. The idea is that there
> would be one URL to post a message, and another to "listen". This
> latter request would never completely finish loading in browsers;
> rather, connections would remain open, and posted text would be sent to
> all listening browsers. There are existing HTTP chat clients that work
> this way.
>
> Webrick, it seems, is too abstract and servlet-oriented to operate well
> this way. I need an httpd toolkit at a much lower level -- something
> that will let me keep hundreds of connections open on the listen side
> while quickly dispatching posts on the other side in the same process
> and hopefully in the very same thread. I also need to become aware of
> when the listening connections are closed, so that I can update the
> chat roster.
>
> Perl's HTTP::Daemon is well designed for this kind of thing. Is there
> something similar in ruby-land, or is there someone who knows webrick
> guts well enough to say how to misuse it in this way?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Joe
>
> P.S. Although I've said "chat" above, in reality I'm going to be
> passing arbitrary javascript messages around, thus creating a platform
> for enabling complex real-time programmatic interaction between all
> users of a site.
>
>