Polling and/or Pushing

Dan Creswell writes in his bookmark notes (so what do I link to?)...

Polling is indeed nice and simple but it also has it's problems - how often to poll, resource consumption etc all of which the average enterprise finds offensive - probably why they'd rather do push even though it adds complexity.

Which is why I'm glad all those smart people worked on http and atom (links to the usual suspects omitted). For most cases, maybe it comes down to starting like this (related posts: Bill, Mike)...

• Follow those specs (http, atom format, atompub) as far as they take you, i.e. when the customer can afford to obey the rules of polling, aggregating, etc.
• When the customer has a need to know more immediately, or has a need to know many intermittent things without always knowing whom to poll, then use atom entries over xmpp.

Straying from that only under exeptional conditions.