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instant messenger communicate using http rather than tcp/websocket

I notice an instant messenger using javascript/http/xmlhttprequest rather than tcp/websocket to communicate.
such as http://w.qq.com/login.html
I monitored its communication way in chrome developer tool.
All are http requests. One request to server every minute.
The thing I confused is that if I send a message to the http client, it receives the message immediately.
As I know http client can not get message from others, it has to send request and get response.
Is there any way to make http client to get message from others without using tcp/socket or sending request and geting response?
Your comment welcome

I don't get all this asian hieroglyphs, but they probably use long-polling: client asks server for new data and server holds answer (don't send anything, and don't close connection) while data is not ready (new message came) or until huge timeout expired. As soon as connection closed, client process response and sends next long poll request. The more common term for "permanent" connect via http called Comet. As you can see, Comet can be implemented via many techniques. As for me, the most modern is ajax streaming. It requires modern browser of course, but worth it. It's not so hard to implement streaming by yourself, but I believe there are few js libs which do the job for you.
Upd:
Here is pretty good explanation with code source
and
here is one of many questions about streaming on SO (the answer in the bottom is most interesting I guess)

Advice on which technology to use for real time notifications

I have X amount of activity sensors connected to a server that inserts data to a database everytime a sensor is triggered. What I'm trying to do is create a web interface with a blue print of the facility (svg) and whenever a sensor is triggered, besides the db insert, I want it to show some sort of alert in my blue print. For that I need to keep an open connection to the server I think.
I was thinking of using web sockets, but it might be overkill since I only need to retrieve data from the server. But running an ajax call every second doesn't sound very efficient either. Are there any other alternatives?
Thank you

Some potential choices include:
WebSocket
Adobe® Flash® Socket
AJAX long polling
AJAX multipart streaming
Forever Iframe
JSONP Polling
Which actual transport you end up using will depend on the your requirements for browser support and what technology you are using on the server to handle these requests. The transport choice may also depend on your network topology - what types of load balancers you need to integrate with, proxies, etc.
There are many libraries available on both the client and server sides, many of which support more than one of these transports.
For example (not an exhaustive list):
socket.io for nodejs
WebSocket
Adobe® Flash® Socket
AJAX long polling
AJAX multipart streaming
Forever Iframe
JSONP Polling
SignalR for an asp/.net backend
WebSockets
Server-Sent Events
ForeverFrame
Long Polling
Atmosphere for a java backend
WebSockets
Server Side Events (SSE)
Long-Polling
Forever frame
JSONP
IMO - Websockets is NOT overkill for this type of problem and would lend itself nicely to this type of application.

Without specifically discussing frameworks or knowing what is running in the backend of your server(s), we have a few options to consider for the frontend:
Websockets
Websockets are designed for bidirectional communication, although it is kind of shocking how many users are surfing the web in a browser that doesn't support websockets. I always recommend a fallback for this, such as the other methods listed below.
SSE
SSE is an HTML5 spec and is still shaky at best. Try scrolling on a page while when an SSE event fires... It may be a little easier on the backend, put it sometimes hangs on the client side since it runs inside the same thread that the DOM is running in.
Long Polling
Keeps your connection open. It doesn't scale well with PHP, but performs swimmingly with Python+Twisted on the backend, or Node.Js
Good Old Ajax
Keep your requests small, and you still have a scalable solution. Yes, a full GET request is the most expensive, but is supported in just about every browser rolled out the past ten years. It is also worth noting that GET requests are easy to scale horizontally with more hardware.
In a perfect world:
You would break up your application into a few components, operating behind a reverse proxy such as Nginx. Then use Node.Js + Socket.IO handle the realtime aspects of your app.
Another option would be to use small Ajax requests, and offer websocket support for the browsers that support it. This is advice specifically for PHP in the backend.

WebSocket is certainly not overkill. On the contrary. With websockets, you have a bi-directional communication channel; this means, that the server can initiate communication whenever it seems fit (e.g. when sensor data changes).
In a previous project, I have used node.js together with socket.io, to monitor 50+ sensors. Data was updated in real-time in a browser. The data was visualized using smoothie.js.
Whenever a sensor value was updated, it was communicated to the browser. Some sensors only updated once a minute, others once a second, ...
Polling would have been overkill, because it would retrieve all data for all sensors, even from those that were not updated yet.

I had a similar problem and did a lot of research on this. As I understand it, there are three main options:
Short polling: Have an endpoint that your javascript client pings every second. This is the worst option, because the pings add latency up to one second to your communication, and depending on how you implement, the endpoint could query the database every second, adding unnecessary overhead.
Long polling: Have an endpoint that your javascript client pings that holds the connection until a) the event occurs or b) the connection times out. If the endpoint returns a response, the client gets the event information. If the endpoint does not return a response, no event has occurred, and the client sends a new request. This is a good option because the events can immediately trigger the response to the client, assuming you have an asynchronous interprocess communication layer (like 0MQ) to send the message without any sort of polling.
Websocket: Have your javascript client connect to a websocket server, which will send a message to your client immediately upon the event trigger.
I think a websocket is your best option, because it accommodates immediate communication of the event without all the request/response overhead. And most importantly, this is exactly what websockets are designed to do! As such, you will probably have to write the least amount of custom code with this solution.

There are two great commercial services that might work for you.
Firebase - a javascript hierarchical database and realtime
messaging/ synchronization platform, uses websockets and has other fallbacks
PubNub - a real time message passing and queue system, uses websockets

Can I keep pushing data from the server to the same connection?

I'm setting up a stock-ticker like web-page, written in JavaScript. I am also writing the server that the page talks to, in C++.
I would like to make the web page efficient, such that it makes sends single subscription message to the app server, and then holds a keep-alive connection open, constantly receiving inbound data pushed from the app server.
At the moment, I have to re-issue the web clients' subscription call every time I receive data from the server. The problem is that each time the XHR object hits readyState(4), the call is effectively completed. Any data arriving at the web page after this is ignored. The web-client can resend data and that resets the object, but the send is unnecessary, and is only being used to reset the XHR object.
I would like to know if it is possible to somehow reset the existing XHR object, and put it into a state where it expects more inbound data, so that when more data is pushed to the web page, the web page responds and processes it.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give. Note: Not using JQuery on this project.

I highly recommend looking into Websockets, especially a library like socket.io, which encapsulates various browser's implementations of Websocket transports into a single API (WS, JSON, JSONP, Flash and Long Polling).
Socket.io client libraries should be now be supported by all major browsers. Your only challenge might be locating a C++ specific server implementation. Hopefully this SO question might be of some help
Otherwise, your only other option is long-polling or comet on the client with a suitable server-side implementation that would scale (i.e. something like an event driven server like NginX as opposed to a thread-per-connection architecture.)
I do appreciate that you are committed to C++ but my humble advise would be to investigate Node.js as it can and does provide a very performant solution with very little effort.
HTH and all the best.

HTTP is a one-off protocol: one request, one response, and you're done. If you want to keep a connection open, you can use Websockets (MDN reference page, client-side code example). However consider it won't be supported on older browsers (IE, for example, just started supporting Websockets on version 10), so you'll probably need to implement a fallback using XHR and long-polling.

Prevent recursive calls of XmlHttpRequest to server

I've been googling for hours for this issue, but did not find any solution.
I am currently working on this app, built on Meteor.
Now the scenario is, after the website is opened and all the assets have been loaded in browser, the browser constantly makes recursive xhr calls to server. These calls are made at the regular interval of 25 seconds.
This can be seen in the Network tab of browser console. See the Pending request of the last row in image.
I can't figure out from where it originates, and why it is invoked automatically even when the user is idle.
Now the question is, How can I disable these automatic requests? I want to invoke the requests manually, i.e. when the menu item is selected, etc.
Any help will be appriciated.
[UPDATE]
In response to the Jan Dvorak's comment:
When I type "e" in the search box, the the list of events which has name starting with letter "e" will be displayed.
The request goes with all valid parameters and the Payload like this:
["{\"msg\":\"sub\",\"id\":\"8ef5e419-c422-429a-907e-38b6e669a493\",\"name\":\"event_Coll_Search_by_PromoterName\",\"params\":[\"e\"]}"]
And this is the response, which is valid.
a["{\"msg\":\"data\",\"subs\":[\"8ef5e419-c422-429a-907e-38b6e669a493\"]}"]
The code for this action is posted here
But in the case of automatic recursive requests, the request goes without the payload and the response is just a letter "h", which is strange. Isn't it? How can I get rid of this.?

Meteor has a feature called
Live page updates.
Just write your templates. They automatically update when data in the database changes. No more boilerplate redraw code to write. Supports any templating language.
To support this feature, Meteor needs to do some server-client communication behind the scenes.
Traditionally, HTTP was created to fetch dead data. The client tells the server it needs something, and it gets something. There is no way for the server to tell the client it needs something. Later, it became needed to push some data to the client. Several alternatives came to existence:
polling:
The client makes periodic requests to the server. The server responds with new data or says "no data" immediately. It's easy to implement and doesn't use much resources. However, it's not exactly live. It can be used for a news ticker but it's not exactly good for a chat application.
If you increase the polling frequency, you improve the update rate, but the resource usage grows with the polling frequency, not with the data transfer rate. HTTP requests are not exactly cheap. One request per second from multiple clients at the same time could really hurt the server.
hanging requests:
The client makes a request to the server. If the server has data, it sends them. If the server doesn't have data, it doesn't respond until it does. The changes are picked up immediately, no data is transferred when it doesn't need to be. It does have a few drawbacks, though:
If a web proxy sees that the server is silent, it eventually cuts off the connection. This means that even if there is no data to send, the server needs to send a keep-alive response anyways to make the proxies (and the web browser) happy.
Hanging requests don't use up (much) bandwidth, but they do take up memory. Nowadays' servers can handle multiple concurrent TCP connections, so it's less of an issue than it was before. What does need to be considered is the amount of memory associated with the threads holding on to these requests - especially when the connections are tied to specific threads serving them.
Browsers have hard limits on the number of concurrent requests per domain and in total. Again, this is less of a concern now than it was before. Thus, it seems like a good idea to have one hanging request per session only.
Managing hanging requests feels kinda manual as you have to make a new request after each response. A TCP handshake takes some time as well, but we can live with a 300ms (at worst) refractory period.
Chunked response:
The client creates a hidden iFrame with a source corresponding to the data stream. The server responds with an HTTP response header immediately and leaves the connection open. To send a message, the server wraps it in a pair of <script></script> tags that the browser executes when it receives the closing tag. The upside is that there's no connection reopening but there is more overhead with each message. Moreover, this requires a callback in the global scope that the response calls.
Also, this cannot be used with cross-domain requests as cross-domain iFrame communication presents its own set of problems. The need to trust the server is also a challenge here.
Web Sockets:
These start as a normal HTTP connection but they don't actually follow the HTTP protocol later on. From the programming point of view, things are as simple as they can be. The API is a classic open/callback style on the client side and the server just pushes messages into an open socket. No need to reopen anything after each message.
There still needs to be an open connection, but it's not really an issue here with the browser limits out of the way. The browser knows the connection is going to be open for a while, so it doesn't need to apply the same limits as to normal requests.
These seem like the ideal solution, but there is one major issue: IE<10 doesn't know them. As long as IE8 is alive, web sockets cannot be relied upon. Also, the native Android browser and Opera mini are out as well (ref.).
Still, web sockets seem to be the way to go once IE8 (and IE9) finally dies.
What you see are hanging requests with the timeout of 25 seconds that are used to implement the live update feature. As I already said, the keep-alive message ("h") is used so that the browser doesn't think it's not going to get a response. "h" simply means "nothing happens".
Chrome supports web sockets, so Meteor could have used them with a fallback to long requests, but, frankly, hanging requests are not at all bad once you've got them implemented (sure, the browser connection limit still applies).

If I wanted to create an AJAX chat what communication technique should be used to maintain scalability?

I put together an AJAX chat a while back ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. The javascript would hit the server about every 7 seconds to check for new messages. Obviously this was horrible on performance as the chat grew and included more and more users. The site traffic grew exponentially with so many requests going on. A user could leave the computer on all day and not even be there and they would still be making hits every 7 seconds.
Is there a better way to do this? I have heard of something called "push" but I haven't really been able to wrap my head around it. I think I just need pointed in the right direction.
1.) What is the best way to develop an AJAX chat and have it be scalable?
2.) What is push and how would I just that with jQuery?

1.) What is the best way to develop an AJAX chat and have it be scalable?
I agree with #freakish about the complexity and potential lack of scaling of IIS.
However, there is a relatively new Microsoft option in the works called SignalR which could become a core part of ASP.NET. More details in this related SO Question:
AJAX Comet - Is there any solution Microsoft is working on or supports to allow it to be scalable?
2.) What is push and how would I just that with jQuery?
Partially answered elsewhere, but it's a long-held persistent connection between the server and the client which means the server can instantly 'push' data to the client when it has new data available.
jQuery does support making AJAX requests but the core library doesn't support expose ways of doing HTTP Long-Polling or HTTP Streaming. More information in this SO answer to 'Long Polling/HTTP Streaming General Questions'.

Server push is a technology that allows the server to push data back to the client without forcing client to make many requests (like every 7 seconds). It is not really a matter of javascript but rather good server scripting. The upcoming HTML5 will make it simple due to server-sent events and/or WebSockets. This will be a true TCP connection between different machines.
But if you intend to make a webpage compatible with older browsers, then the most common technique is the long polling. The client sends request to the server and the server does not respond to it until it has new data. If it does then the response is made and the client immediatly after receiving data calls the server with new request. In practice however this requires the server to be well-written (for example it has to maintain thousands of idle requests at the same time) and can become a rather big challenge for developers.
I hope this helps. :) Good luck!

The technique you should use is the real-time persistent long running connections over a web page using WebSockets. You can use this library.

Node.js is becoming quite popular to build something like this and supports socket connections so you could push the data out only when there is a new message. But that would be learning something completely new.
Another nice potential would be to use MVC's OutputCacheAttribute and use the SQL dependency option so your AJAX page could be cached and would only be a new request when a new chat message appears. Also you would want your controller to be an Asynchronous controller to help reduce the load on IIS.
Enjoy, optimization is always fun and very time consuming!