Avoiding polling on services like Heroku and Google App Engine?

Question

I do not think there's a way to do this but I thought I'd ask to see what workarounds people are using to avoid polling on Heroku and/or GAE.

How are you sending out notifications in somewhat real-time from these apps?

Answer 1

GAE can use one of the following to notify another system:

• xmpp
• urlfetch to a callback url
  • like to pubsubhubbub
• send email

Answer 2

With Heroku's new Cedar stack you can do long polling.

There's a link to some long polling example code here.

Answer 3

As @dar mentions, you can use PubSubHubbub to do realtime notification without polling. Nick Johnson has an excellent tutorial on using an existing PubSubHubbub server, or even including a server with your application.

This will let you publish feeds and subscribe to them in realtime without polling.