A restful web notification service

With the rapid growth of mobile applications or web services, many users are using the same service at the same time which leads to the need for scalable application services. To enlarge the capability of handling large volumes of concurrent requests, server-side push technologies have been then introduced recently. Server-side push technology tries to eliminate unnecessary client requests by sending notification messages to clients when a data change event is triggered on the server side. There are two famous server-side push frameworks used today, and they are services using the Pub/Sub protocol, and the Ajax Push Model. These two mechanisms need middleware between clients and servers which result in complex and heavy-weight system architectures for application developers. To simplify development and increase ability to accommodate the growth in application users, a RESTful notification service is proposed in this paper. The notification service leverages the event-driven characteristic of JavaScript, and pushes response data asynchronously to different requests. Based on the RESTful software architecture style, the proposed notification service is not only a lightweight system but also has impressive performance.