No worries. This is my masters dissertation btw.

What exactly is the title of your dissertation? (just curious)

Liable to change but "An approach to i/o for rest clients which is neither batch nor stream; nor SAX nor DOM." I'm writing it now.

There's a cool thing you might try where you can download the historic messages, then continue to stream live ones over the same http. If you don't care about old browsers (anything without xhr2 progress events) should work fine to download and stream on same connection.