Does it just do long-polling to receive the data? This seems another app where enabled WebSockets support would have been nice.
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Nope, it is not a push data service. New data files are generated every minute and available to the client to pull down.
While it is possible to set up WebSockets or something similar to do a truly fancy data flow, we preferred to spend our bandwidth resources on making Firefox 4 available for people to download. ;)
Simpler than that: It just displays the data in 60-second chunks, delayed by sixty seconds. Here's one of the blocks:
http://glow.mozilla.org/data/json/2011/03/22/16/51/map.json
This would actually be an excellent opportunity for http streaming (ie, the forever frame), too. Long polling is great when you're waiting for a singular event, but not so much when it's ongoing data being pushed down.