Communicate between azure websites

Question

I'm currently hosting 2 webstites (clientportal and admin), in windows azure websites.

I'm going to introduce SignalR right now, to get rid of javascript polling. What I need, is when an admin send a broadcast message on the admin site, all the active client should be receive it. Now, the clien polls the webserver all the time, when an ajax poll receives, the webserver check for new messages in the database.

What would be the best way, to notify the client webserver from the admin webserver? WebApi is ok for this? Or are there any simple way?

Answer 1

From the point of view of Azure Websites and SignalR, it is transparent who is the Client and who is the Admin. This is an implementation detail, and thus, there are many ways to do it.

SignalR is split in two parts: The javascript library, and the .NET library that you use to create your "Hub". One way to accomplish what you are trying to do is to implement the Hub functionality in your Admin back-end using the .NET side of SignalR and ASP.NET Web API; and use the javascript side of SignalR to subscribe and listen for notifications on the Client side.

Another way to do it is to create a third component, just for the SignalR Hub, independent of both the Client and the Admin websites. In this scenario both the Admin and the Client would subscribe to the Hub, but only the Admin would push, and the Client would listen.

You can find many working examples on the internet. This is one of them: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh965663.aspx

I hope this answers your questions.