Building the Realtime User Experience : Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites

The Web is moving ever faster towards sites that give users what they want, not when they load or refresh pages, but rather in real time. Understanding how this works and how to leverage it on your own site so that it is useful to the user is important knowledge any developer should have. In his book, Building the Realtime User Experience, Ted Roden does just that. Building the Realtime User Experience breaks down the technologies that make the most sense for a developer to deliver to the user in realtime such as syndication and instant messaging, for instance. One thing the book does that I appreciate is it presents the examples found throughout using different languages, applying the most practical language for a give scenario or toolkit. Doing this does not make understanding the examples very difficult, however, and any developer with reasonable coding skills should be able to follow along in any language without difficulty. The first chapter gives an introduction into what "realtime" means in terms of the Web and development and lays out the languages the examples will use. From Chapter 2 on, the book jumps right into the different technologies that present well in a realtime format starting with syndication. Roden focuses on two technologies for syndication, Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and PubSubHubbub, giving each protocol pretty much equal treatment, leaving it for the reader to decide which protocol to implement. Chapter 3 discusses how to implement widgets that will display realtime on a web page, using Twitter and FriendFeed as examples. What was of more use was the discussion in Chapter 4 on server-side "push" technologies, and the transition into Chapter 5, which introduces the reader to Tornado - an excellent chapter that shows through example how to get Tornado running and in use on a site. The next three chapters deal with chat, instant messaging, and SMS respectively. In each chapter, Roden gives examples on how to build an application around these technologies, which a web environment can then utilize. The chat application built throughout Chapter 6 is quite robust, as is the instant messaging client/server created in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 then extends the instant messaging service by integrating SMS into it. I found Chapter 9 to be an interesting chapter, but it differs from the rest of the book in that it focuses on what a developer can do with analytics to view a site from an administrative point of view in realtime, instead of focusing on delivering something realtime to the end user. The examples yielded some interesting concepts and left me considering all of the possibilities for back-end development that I more often than not neglect or even disregard in my own development. Of all the chapters in the book, I think this one is the one I am most thankful Roden took the time to write. Roden finishes the book with a "Putting It All Together" chapter that takes the different applications built throughout the preceding chapters and mashes them together into a realtime game that could be pretty fun with a group of friends. Overall, Building the Realtime User Experience is a terrific introduction into the realtime Web, and shows the reader just some of the technologies that may work well on a site. The examples are thorough and yield robust applications that are tweakable and integrate into existing sites. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in developing applications or widgets for their site that work in a realtime manner. The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With sites such as Facebook and FriendFeed leading the way, users are coming to expect that all websites should serve content to them as it occurs. With this book, you'll learn how to add several realtime features to your site -- everything from chat and messaging services to streaming content feeds -- without making significant changes to your existing infrastructure. Moving towards a realtime model doesn't mean just updating content in your web browser. It requires getting the content to users as quickly as possible and letting them interact with it on their own terms. Building the Realtime User Experience explores several practical web-based examples of realtime -- including how realtime works and how to build it using Tornado, Comet, PubSubHubBub, App Engine, XMPP, AWS, and other technologies. Learn how to build a homepage that aggregates short updates into a larger format Use the Comet web development model, which enables a web server to push data to a browser rather than having the browser request it Understand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat service Discover the advantages of web apps outside of the browser, based on SMS and IM Learn how realtime affects web advertising, and how you can measure user engagement to support ads Build an application that combines several features, including chat, Comet, and more The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurs—on smartphones as well as computers. This book shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You'll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser.Throughout the book are many practical JavaScript and Python examples for advanced web developers that you can use on your site now. And in the final chapter, you'll build a location-aware game that combines all of the technologies discussed.Use the latest realtime syndication technology, including PubSubHubbubBuild dynamic widgets on your homepage to show realtime updates from several sourcesLearn how to use long polling to 'push' content from your server to browsersCreate an application using the Tornado web server that makes sense of massive amounts of streaming contentUnderstand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat serviceUse IM and SMS to enable users to interact with your site outside of a web browserImplement custom analytics to measure engagement in realtime The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurson smartphones as well as computers. This book shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You'll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser. Throughout the book are many practical JavaScript and Python examples for advanced web developers that you can use on your site now. And in the final chapter, you'll build a location-aware game that combines all of the technologies discussed. This book shows developers how to move beyond Ajax techniques to game-changing interface designs, letting them create web applications that present data in realtime