> - "Streaming" as far as I understand is about "push" functionality. > I would not go as far as to say "polling is bad". Since twitter is not real > time ESME would maybe not need to be real time as well. This means one could > poll infrequently (every few minutes?) using conditional GET's, which would > not be that inefficient. Comet has the disadvantage that without special > server support (available in Jetty, but not in Netweaver CE for example) it > causes a lot of threads to be created on the server, which is also not > really efficient.
Just wanted to comment on threading- the advantage of using Scala is that the actor model is not necessarily associated with one thread per request. When using "react", there doesn't have to be a thread backing each actor. Also, using Lift's CometActor is a nice abstraction which I can imagine could even transparently implement HTML 5 WebSockets one day without significant changes to the client code.
