If you thought our application was real time until now, you would be wrong. Currently, our application gives us the appearance of being instant, but in reality, this is just the browser polling the server for information every once in a while (in our case, once in a while meant two seconds in the previous chapters).

While you may be thinking that this is okay since there is rarely any actual need to know the temperature or humidity with an urgency greater than a few seconds, there is still another problem that we haven't considered, and that is the large amount of useless data that is passed around because of this method of getting information. In a majority of cases, the temperature or humidity is stable (as far as our desired accuracy of a single decimal point is concerned) for much longer than a few seconds and changes...