A web application, nowadays, is expected to be as reactive as a desktop one; moving statically from one page to another is no longer accepted. Furthermore, to enhance the user experience, we need to reduce as much as possible the amount of actions needed to have the content updated constantly.
We entered the real-time era some time back, and the mobile explosion has definitively confirmed that. Given this fact, the problem we face when creating a web application dedicated to mobile devices is, still, the bandwidth (this doesn't seem like we have entered the same era as our needs). So, we'll have to think more about some optimizations while communicating with the server. This chapter is dedicated to the utilities Play! Framework 2 is offering us to enable us to satisfy these points.
The following is what will be covered in this chapter:
Creating a dashboard, where the data will be updated in the background
Following the naïve approach using a polling...