A Comparison of Push and Pull Techniques for Ajax

TL;DR

This paper compares push and pull techniques for Ajax applications, analyzing their fundamental limits and presenting empirical results to evaluate their effectiveness in real-time web data delivery.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of push versus pull methods for Ajax, including an empirical study comparing their performance and trade-offs.

Findings

Push techniques can reduce latency compared to pull.

Pull methods are simpler but may introduce delays.

Empirical results show trade-offs in responsiveness and complexity.

Abstract

Ajax applications are designed to have high user interactivity and low user-perceived latency. Real-time dynamic web data such as news headlines, stock tickers, and auction updates need to be propagated to the users as soon as possible. However, Ajax still suffers from the limitations of the Web's request/response architecture which prevents servers from pushing real-time dynamic web data. Such applications usually use a pull style to obtain the latest updates, where the client actively requests the changes based on a predefined interval. It is possible to overcome this limitation by adopting a push style of interaction where the server broadcasts data when a change occurs on the server side. Both these options have their own trade-offs. This paper explores the fundamental limits of browser-based applications and analyzes push solutions for Ajax technology. It also shows the results of an empirical study comparing push and pull.