Push technology delivers data automatically, while pull technology requires a user request. Pull technology is used for email, web browsing, downloading, and web syndication. Email clients can use both technologies. Web syndication allows users to read updates offline through a news reader.
Some actions that occur between online material and a user can be initiated in one of two ways. Others started out only one way. The initiation methods are referred to as push technology and pull technology. Push technology expects data to be delivered to a user’s computer automatically, either on a schedule or based on a triggering event. Pull technology is the opposite: it involves a specific user request to move data to the user’s computer. There are four frequent uses of pull technology: requesting mail, loading web pages, downloading from the Internet, and web syndication to a newsreader.
Email clients can work with push or pull technology, but this depends on the client, rather than the user’s choice. If a client that offers pull technology is used, the client will be offered preference settings that will allow it to configure the email client to periodically query the server and download email. Once this step is done, the download happens automatically, so this pull technology may look like a push technology. However, the user retains control and can change the polling interval or even shut down the client if desired.
On the Internet, every entry of a URL or click on a link to a page that results in a loaded web page is a result of pull technology at work, although many people think of it primarily as “navigation”. It’s clearer that something is pulled when a user downloads an item from the internet. This is the case when you download a web page to your printer, an ebook purchase from Amazon®, a new driver for your monitor, a photograph from Flickr®, a catalog of English teaching qualifications from Oxford University Press Canada ®, or a webmail that you go online to fetch yourself.
Web syndication allows users to gather updates from chosen websites and read them offline via a desktop news reader, such as NetNewsWire®, if desired. When they do, rather than reading them through a browser like Bloglines®, which keeps them online, they’re leveraging pull technology in a different way. The material of their choice will be delivered to them as soon as it is available, but only because they requested it in the first place and only when they start the program. Keep it off and nothing is pulled.
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