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Everybody has the experience when the connection is suddenly closed by various reasons (or without any reason at all) even during the regular page update. Thus, the question "in which degree the offered long-term connection is suitable for missing critical, real-time applications" might be asked. However, we are not going to argue about the reliability too long. It is very personal how each individual characterizes how often it might happen. The reliability is only the tip of the iceberg.
Keeping a connection alive with each connected client spends the server resources. It requires memory allocating for each connection. Even, the resource management might be controlled by NIO, this does not solve the network communication with proxy servers and a firewall when they close the non-active connections or to be rebooted because the long-term connections are recognized as hung-up.
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In conclusion, the Ajax Push based on the long lived Http connection is not reliable, does not guarantee the data delivery, so in cannot be used for the mission-critical application. Also, the major motivation about significantly reducing the latency for data delivery is under big doubt.
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This was a short quote from our new article about classical Ajax Push and alternatives to it. In this article we will introduce the "Ajax-On-Demand" technique that we plan to integrate into the future Ajax4jsf.
