Can this be done?

[CLEAR-RCIC]

We want to write a web application that talks to a data provider that queries
many databases. Depending on what query is launched from the web client the
data provider would return a response in a few seconds, few minutes or
possibly longer. The obvious problem is that due to the request/response
nature of the internet, once one call is made the user would have to wait
until that thread is returned before making another request. One way around
that would be use a message queue and put all responses in the queue and poll
it for results every few seconds. This seems sloppy and I was wondering if
there was a better way to do it (short of writing a socket program).

[Sean Chambers]

Maybe I'm just seeing past your problem, but wouldn't just using
asynchronous requests with callback functions achieve what you are
trying to do?

Sean

CLEAR-RCIC wrote:

We want to write a web application that talks to a data provider that queries
many databases. Depending on what query is launched from the web client the
data provider would return a response in a few seconds, few minutes or
possibly longer. The obvious problem is that due to the request/response
nature of the internet, once one call is made the user would have to wait
until that thread is returned before making another request. One way around
that would be use a message queue and put all responses in the queue and poll
it for results every few seconds. This seems sloppy and I was wondering if
there was a better way to do it (short of writing a socket program).