Flash as3 - short interval http polling

Question

I would like to use http polling instead of socket in my flash application.

Does http polling every 0.5 seconds can be problematic? (In terms of synchronization and performance).

Answer 1

It depends on your task. For example, if you want to poll all lifetime of your client application, I would go with higher poll interval (several seconds) or go with socket connection. But if your task to send something and wait for completion of async process on server-side, polling will be a nice approach. And in your PollingService, wait for response from the server, and after 500ms timeout, do next request, you will not have any synchonization problems at all.

//delay 500 ms between response from the previous request and future request
var service: PollingService = new PollingService(500); 
service.start();

For realisation of such service you will need only 2 classes: URLLoader and Timer. And maybe signals or EventDispatcher ;)