I had seen that many of the periodic update methods looking for changes to display in the browser in the rails book poll the server every so many seconds which seems to generate alot of traffic.
A project that I had been working on is they want to make an ajax request to the server which will just wait and never return until the server decides that a change has occurred and at that time which could be several minutes or hours the response would go back to the browser. The problem with this seems to be that it won't work with rails because each http request is serial. In order for this to work, I need some kind of proxy server or alternative server through some other means that can have multiple http requests outstanding and these would either time out eventually or return at some point.
How can I do this or which rails books, blogs, or websites might have examples ? Can webrick or event machine be usefull here ?
