What is the best solution for real-time bi-directional communication between a web application running on a mobile phone and a server?

I'm looking at having thousands of simultaneous connections from mobile phones to the server whereby anyti开发者_Go百科me a user interacts with his cell phone, the data is sent and logged by the server. Also, anytime the server has new information for that user, the server can push that information without a browser refresh. I am wondering what is more stable and how you would build this?

A good real-time framework or infrastructure will have numerous APIs that should let you connect any device, no matter the technology, to the real-time server e.g. an iOS client library for iPhone and iPad, a JavaScript client library for numerous platforms including normal and mobile web, an Android compatible Java library and so on.

An interesting idea might be to choose which ever framework or real-time service suits your needs best and then using something like PhoneGap. But, as @rt2088 says, it depends if you need the notification app to be running as a service on the phone or as a standalone application.

The choice will also depend on whether you want to install, host, maintain and manage the scaling of your own real-time services or not. If not, there are a number of services out there who you could use so you can concentrate on building your application. If you do want to manage your own infrastructure then the Comet Maturity guide could be a good start. It's a little out of date but is still probably the best reference available.

the ability to push new content the user based on his GPS location which is "pinged" to our server. Based on that, we deliver local content. What frameworks are you talking about?

There are a number of real-time frameworks available at the moment. Some are hosted services and others require installation on your own hardware. The majority of them will come with a bunch of libraries in different technologies that make it easier to get up and running with them e.g. a JavaScript library that wraps the WebSocket object and also manages fallback for web browsers that don't support WebSockets.

I've just created a Real-Time Technologies Guide in which I've listed all the real-time technologies that I could think of and provided a bunch of tags associated with each.

wouldn't a javascript client library cover all platforms if it is a web appilcation?

If the application is a web application then yes, a JavaScript library would be all you need for the client application. The server side libraries that you require would depend on the real-time technology you choose.

Best solution to achieve this is to use the WebSocket communication. It is bidirectional asynchronous communication. Currently every browser supports this new standard and plenty of code snippets available. You just have to google it. There are many server and client side frameworks. choose the one best suits to your requirement.

The details of the WebSocket specification is available at -

Websocket specification

Do you need notification when user uses mobile browser of handset or the mobile handset itself (performing non-browser tasks)? Based on that, the framework to record user activity can be selected.