Building the Realtime User Experience

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