I have built a complex AIR application which has been successfully running for quite some time of many PCs. Unfortunately, I have a plaguing problem with internet connectivity and I was wondering if anyone had encountered this issue before.
Every once in a while, the program will completely stop talking to the internet (all services start faulting). I wrote special code in my program to monitor the situation in which I use two different services to contact the same server.
The first service:
var req:URLRequest = new URLRequest("myURL.com");
this.urlMonitor = new URLMonitor(req, [200, 304]); // Acceptable status codes
this.urlMonitor.pollInterval = 60 * 1000; // Every minute
this.urlMonitor.addEventListener(StatusEvent.STATUS, onStatusChange);
this.urlMonitor.start();
private function onStatusChange(e:StatusEvent):void
{
if (this.urlMonitor.available)
{
pollStatusOnline = true;
Online = true;
}
else
{
pollStatusOnline = false;
Online = false;
}
}
The secondary method is a normal HTTP Service call:
checkInService = new HTTPService();
checkInService.method = "POST";
checkInService.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT,sendResult);
checkInService.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT, faultResult);
checkInService.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, invokeAttempt);
checkInService.url = "myURL.com";
checkInService.concurrency = Concurrency.LAST;
checkInService.send(params);
These two services point to the same location and work 98% of the time. Sometimes, after a few hours, I have noticed that both services no longer can connect to the website. The HTTP Service returns a StatusCode 0. I am able to open command prompt and ping the server directly with no problem from the PC which is failing. The services will not function again until the program is restarted.
I have been working on this issue for many months now without resolution. If anyone is able to even point me in a somewhat possible, maybe this might be the problem, possibly, direction, I would really appreciate it.
Thank you in advance.
Check the code value of the StatusEvent you receive from the URLMonitor - this might give more info than the HTTPService (you might also want to try passing a null value to URLMonitor constructor, to widen the acceptable status codes).
If you have access to the server(s?) in question, check their logs. Could the server config have changed such that it might now consider such frequent requests as flooding?
You should also be able to use an HTTP debugger like Fiddler or Charles on the client machine to see more information about the requests going out of your application.
Im currently working on an integration where the external service returns json strings.
Some of the strings are quite long, and im just wondering if anyone knows of a plugin that can be used to count down how long a total request takes.
I know i could run a timer on the server to monitor how long the request takes, but what im hoping to see is if there is a way to time the entire experience within a browser so I can see how long it takes to request content and display the end result (the webpage) to a user ?
thanks in advance
As pointed out, you can use the Network tab of Developer Tools to see the timeline, from which you can check the request times and data size of any requested resource within the lifetime of your page.
Alternatively, if what you mean is that you need to have access to the time from within your code, you can measure the time between issuing the request and receiving the response. Something like this should suffice.
var start = Date.now();
http.request(resourceUrl, function(data) {
var stop, duration;
stop = Date.now();
duration = stop - start;
// duration of request in ms
doSomething(data);
});
I'm currently creating my first Chrome extension, so far so good.
It's just a little test where I run multiple timers.
But obviously all my timers reset when I open and close the extension.
So to keep all my timers running, I would have to same them somehow when I close the extension and make them run in the background page.
When I open the extension again, those timers should be send back to the open page.
How would you handle this?
I already have an array of all my timers, what would be the best option for me>
A background page runs at all times when the extension is enabled. You cannot see it, but it can modify other aspects of the extension, like setting the browser action badge.
For example, the following would set the icon badge to the number of unread items in a hypothetical service:
function getUnreadItems(callback) {
$.ajax(..., function(data) {
process(data);
callback(data);
});
}
function updateBadge() {
getUnreadItems(function(data) {
chrome.browserAction.setBadgeText({text:data.unreadItems});
});
}
Then, you can make a request and schedule it so the data is retrieved and processed regularly, you can also stop the request at any time.
var pollInterval = 1000 * 60; // 1 minute
function startRequest() {
updateBadge();
window.setTimeout(startRequest, pollInterval);
}
function stopRequest() {
window.clearTimeout(timerId);
}
Now just load it...
onload='startRequest()'
Also, HTML5 offline storage is good for storing data and constantly update it...
var data = "blah";
localStorage.myTextData = data;
I have a swf that I would like to cookie to control the frame the user see's depending on whether it is a first time site visit or returned visit. My code is below - it works, it doesn't bring back any out messages however when I load the swf into my site that uses this technique the page becomes extremely slow and unresponsive - can anyone help out with any reasons why this may occur?
var my_so:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal("visited", "/");
if (my_so.data.newVisitor != undefined) {
//object exists: return user
this.gotoAndPlay(2);
} else {
//object doesn't exist: new user
my_so.data.newVisitor = "no";
this.gotoAndStop(1);
}
Many thanks in advance
Rachel
SharedObjects in general are extremely slow in Flash. That being said, there is no reason why it should be slowing down your entire site after it has been used.
When writing to a SO, you have to use flush() to tell Flash to actually write the data.
my_so.data.newVisitor = "no";
// Write the data to disk
my_so.flush();
Another thing to try would be to actively close the connection after you are done with it. So after the else statement you would add:
// Close the connection
my_so.close();
// Clear pointer for GC
my_so = null;
If that doesn't work, the next steps would be to put trace statements in and around the SOs and make sure they aren't being accessed while the program is running.
I have read some posts about this topic and the answers are comet, reverse ajax, http streaming, server push, etc.
How does incoming mail notification on Gmail works?
How is GMail Chat able to make AJAX requests without client interaction?
I would like to know if there are any code references that I can follow to write a very simple example. Many posts or websites just talk about the technology. It is hard to find a complete sample code. Also, it seems many methods can be used to implement the comet, e.g. Hidden IFrame, XMLHttpRequest. In my opinion, using XMLHttpRequest is a better choice. What do you think of the pros and cons of different methods? Which one does Gmail use?
I know it needs to do it both in server side and client side.
Is there any PHP and Javascript sample code?
The way Facebook does this is pretty interesting.
A common method of doing such notifications is to poll a script on the server (using AJAX) on a given interval (perhaps every few seconds), to check if something has happened. However, this can be pretty network intensive, and you often make pointless requests, because nothing has happened.
The way Facebook does it is using the comet approach, rather than polling on an interval, as soon as one poll completes, it issues another one. However, each request to the script on the server has an extremely long timeout, and the server only responds to the request once something has happened. You can see this happening if you bring up Firebug's Console tab while on Facebook, with requests to a script possibly taking minutes. It is quite ingenious really, since this method cuts down immediately on both the number of requests, and how often you have to send them. You effectively now have an event framework that allows the server to 'fire' events.
Behind this, in terms of the actual content returned from those polls, it's a JSON response, with what appears to be a list of events, and info about them. It's minified though, so is a bit hard to read.
In terms of the actual technology, AJAX is the way to go here, because you can control request timeouts, and many other things. I'd recommend (Stack overflow cliche here) using jQuery to do the AJAX, it'll take a lot of the cross-compability problems away. In terms of PHP, you could simply poll an event log database table in your PHP script, and only return to the client when something happens? There are, I expect, many ways of implementing this.
Implementing:
Server Side:
There appear to be a few implementations of comet libraries in PHP, but to be honest, it really is very simple, something perhaps like the following pseudocode:
while(!has_event_happened()) {
sleep(5);
}
echo json_encode(get_events());
The has_event_happened function would just check if anything had happened in an events table or something, and then the get_events function would return a list of the new rows in the table? Depends on the context of the problem really.
Don't forget to change your PHP max execution time, otherwise it will timeout early!
Client Side:
Take a look at the jQuery plugin for doing Comet interaction:
Project homepage: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Comet
Google Code: https://code.google.com/archive/p/jquerycomet/ - Appears to have some sort of example usage in the subversion repository.
That said, the plugin seems to add a fair bit of complexity, it really is very simple on the client, perhaps (with jQuery) something like:
function doPoll() {
$.get("events.php", {}, function(result) {
$.each(result.events, function(event) { //iterate over the events
//do something with your event
});
doPoll();
//this effectively causes the poll to run again as
//soon as the response comes back
}, 'json');
}
$(document).ready(function() {
$.ajaxSetup({
timeout: 1000*60//set a global AJAX timeout of a minute
});
doPoll(); // do the first poll
});
The whole thing depends a lot on how your existing architecture is put together.
Update
As I continue to recieve upvotes on this, I think it is reasonable to remember that this answer is 4 years old. Web has grown in a really fast pace, so please be mindful about this answer.
I had the same issue recently and researched about the subject.
The solution given is called long polling, and to correctly use it you must be sure that your AJAX request has a "large" timeout and to always make this request after the current ends (timeout, error or success).
Long Polling - Client
Here, to keep code short, I will use jQuery:
function pollTask() {
$.ajax({
url: '/api/Polling',
async: true, // by default, it's async, but...
dataType: 'json', // or the dataType you are working with
timeout: 10000, // IMPORTANT! this is a 10 seconds timeout
cache: false
}).done(function (eventList) {
// Handle your data here
var data;
for (var eventName in eventList) {
data = eventList[eventName];
dispatcher.handle(eventName, data); // handle the `eventName` with `data`
}
}).always(pollTask);
}
It is important to remember that (from jQuery docs):
In jQuery 1.4.x and below, the XMLHttpRequest object will be in an
invalid state if the request times out; accessing any object members
may throw an exception. In Firefox 3.0+ only, script and JSONP
requests cannot be cancelled by a timeout; the script will run even if
it arrives after the timeout period.
Long Polling - Server
It is not in any specific language, but it would be something like this:
function handleRequest () {
while (!anythingHappened() || hasTimedOut()) { sleep(2); }
return events();
}
Here, hasTimedOut will make sure your code does not wait forever, and anythingHappened, will check if any event happend. The sleep is for releasing your thread to do other stuff while nothing happens. The events will return a dictionary of events (or any other data structure you may prefer) in JSON format (or any other you prefer).
It surely solves the problem, but, if you are concerned about scalability and perfomance as I was when researching, you might consider another solution I found.
Solution
Use sockets!
On client side, to avoid any compatibility issues, use socket.io. It tries to use socket directly, and have fallbacks to other solutions when sockets are not available.
On server side, create a server using NodeJS (example here). The client will subscribe to this channel (observer) created with the server. Whenever a notification has to be sent, it is published in this channel and the subscriptor (client) gets notified.
If you don't like this solution, try APE (Ajax Push Engine).
Hope I helped.
According to a slideshow about Facebook's Messaging system, Facebook uses the comet technology to "push" message to web browsers. Facebook's comet server is built on the open sourced Erlang web server mochiweb.
In the picture below, the phrase "channel clusters" means "comet servers".
Many other big web sites build their own comet server, because there are differences between every company's need. But build your own comet server on a open source comet server is a good approach.
You can try icomet, a C1000K C++ comet server built with libevent. icomet also provides a JavaScript library, it is easy to use as simple as:
var comet = new iComet({
sign_url: 'http://' + app_host + '/sign?obj=' + obj,
sub_url: 'http://' + icomet_host + '/sub',
callback: function(msg){
// on server push
alert(msg.content);
}
});
icomet supports a wide range of Browsers and OSes, including Safari(iOS, Mac), IEs(Windows), Firefox, Chrome, etc.
Facebook uses MQTT instead of HTTP. Push is better than polling.
Through HTTP we need to poll the server continuously but via MQTT server pushes the message to clients.
Comparision between MQTT and HTTP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KNPXPmx88E
Note: my answers best fits for mobile devices.
One important issue with long polling is error handling.
There are two types of errors:
The request might timeout in which case the client should reestablish the connection immediately. This is a normal event in long polling when no messages have arrived.
A network error or an execution error. This is an actual error which the client should gracefully accept and wait for the server to come back on-line.
The main issue is that if your error handler reestablishes the connection immediately also for a type 2 error, the clients would DOS the server.
Both answers with code sample miss this.
function longPoll() {
var shouldDelay = false;
$.ajax({
url: 'poll.php',
async: true, // by default, it's async, but...
dataType: 'json', // or the dataType you are working with
timeout: 10000, // IMPORTANT! this is a 10 seconds timeout
cache: false
}).done(function (data, textStatus, jqXHR) {
// do something with data...
}).fail(function (jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown ) {
shouldDelay = textStatus !== "timeout";
}).always(function() {
// in case of network error. throttle otherwise we DOS ourselves. If it was a timeout, its normal operation. go again.
var delay = shouldDelay ? 10000: 0;
window.setTimeout(longPoll, delay);
});
}
longPoll(); //fire first handler