Polling versus Streaming and service death

Question

I'm looking to do an extension of the chat tutorial data push
for a distributed RIA which will have multiple users interacting
with an external back end data source. Users need to be aware of
changes made to that back end data source, and JMS topics are set
up to allow us to be notified of changes. As well, data changes and
retrieval is conducted via a web service. We'd like to allow for
distribution/load balancing so I initially thought we'd have to use
the polling stream for messages, but now I wonder if using
streaming and having the polling set up as a fall back would
suffice? But I'm not familiar enough to say for certain which
approach would best suit my needs.
Also, is there a way for a client to become aware if it loses
the connection to the BlazeDS server with either? It would be nice
for the users to be prompted that a connection failed and the
application to behave differently, such as trying to resolve the
error.
Any help that can be offered is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

After some more thought and reading, I'm curious if perhaps I
shouldn't just utilize the JMS and RPC features of Blaze from
completely within ActionScript. I'm part way through reading
http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/
, which I didn't find easily but feel I should have been able to.
Hopefully it will fill out the gaps in my knowledge and I'll be
able to come back to answer this but earlier insights are greatly
appreciated.
In essence, I need to be able to dynamically initialize
sub-models of my overall data model when certain portions of the
application are opened. Think of a windowing system in which each
window that opens will only be interested in certain portions of
the overall data. Then once a window is opened, it should be
alerted to changes performed on data it has loaded. These change
notifications are currently set up to be sent out to JMS topics
from the server.
Because of the scale of the data model, we only wish to load
the portions that we need at any given point. We're building a
centralized broker that will handle all the connections for each
window and data retrieval/updates.
Any thoughts, insights or suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks,
Todd