Real-time chat with push notification

Question

I am working on a private messasing functionality for my site, is there a way to get push notifications from the server, that the user has received a new message?

the only technique I know is to constantly poll the server via ajax to see if there are new messages, and reload the messenger window if needed.

thanks for any feedback!

UPD: so far the following directions have been identified:

1) Comet
2) BOSH - Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP
3) XMPP - this is what google talk is based on

Answer 1

You might want to look into XMPP and BOSH. Very comet like and ejabberd combined with nginx can maintain 1000's of connections on a very small box.

Take a look at one of my projects www.vooices.us to see what we have done with XMPP and BOSH.

http://www.ejabberd.im/

http://github.com/ssoper/jquery-bosh/tree/master JQueryBosh - to enable quick and easy access to XMPP over HTTP

It is relativly easy to set up and install.

Paul.