how to implement facebook like notification?

Question

I am trying to implement a Facebook-like live notifications system to notify users whenever someone adds them as friend, like their post or posts replies to their comments.

Answer 1

You should look into COMET techniques, such as forever frame (tutorial) and long polling. That allows you to have a form of a server->client push communication.

Answer 2

You basically set a request up, like callng the service that asks your server/db for the notifications of that user. You may do a while loop that retries if theres no notification (maybe Thread.Sleep in between searches). Your js request will timeout, then you can call the function again in timeout. This means long polling afaik

Answer 3

I am really surprised nobody has mentioned PubNub and Pusher

These two (competitors) are building infrastructure which allows for realtime notifications, just like Facebook.

Answer 4

The only way to do it is to have some sort of mechanism (e.g. Javascript) to repeatedly poll the server for updates. Doing server pushes to web browsers isn't possible.

Answer 5

Facebook notification