Moreover it might not just be developer time vs. latency that's being traded off.
Maintaining a stateful websocket connection on the server side isn't cost-free, and that connection would be idle nearly 100% of the time. The bandwidth consumed via Google's polling solution might well be cheaper than open socket file descriptors of a websockets solution.
Maintaining a stateful websocket connection on the server side isn't cost-free, and that connection would be idle nearly 100% of the time. The bandwidth consumed via Google's polling solution might well be cheaper than open socket file descriptors of a websockets solution.