Push notification to the client browser

Question

I'd like to create an application where when a Super user clicks a link the users should get a notification or rather a content like a pdf for them to access on the screen.

Use Case: When a teacher wants to share a PDF with his students he should be able to notify his students about the pdf available for download and a link has to be provided to do the same.

Answer 1

There are several ways you can accomplish this. The most supported way is through a technique called Comet or long-polling. Basically, the client sends a request to the server and the server doesn't send a response until some event happens. This gives the illusion that the server is pushing to the client.

There are other methods and technologies that actually allow pushing to the client instead of just simulating it (i.e. Web Sockets), but many browsers don't support them.

Answer 2

As you want to implement this in CakePHP (so I assume it's a web-based application), the user will have to have an 'active' page open in order to receive the push messages.

It's worth looking at the first two answers to this, but also just think about how other sites might achieve this. Sites like Facebook, BBC, Stackoverflow all use techniques to keep pages up to date.

I suspect Facebook just uses some AJAX that runs in a loop/timer to periodically pull updates in a way that would make it look like push. If the update request is often enough (short time period), it'll almost look realtime. If it's a long time period it'll look like a pull. Finding the right balance between up-to-dateness and browser/processor/network thrashing is the key.

The actual request shouldn't thrash the system, but the reply in some applications may be much bigger. In your case, the data in each direction is tiny, so you could make the request loop quite short.

Experiment!