Real-Time Real-Fast

As web applications continue to become more interactive and sophisticated, real-time messaging and updates are becoming increasingly prevalent. One of the hottest new APIs in HTML5, is WebSocket, which enables true duplex communication without the overhead, complexity, and extraneous latency of HTTP-based solutions. In this talk, we will see how the WebSocket removes these barriers to create optimal real-time delivery of messages from servers to desktop and mobile web browsers. Although WebSocket is an exciting new API, we will see how we can easily fallback to HTTP-based techniques when WebSocket is not available with Dojo’s Socket API. The server-side is equally important, and real-time messaging has pushed the need for asynchronous I/O in the server. We look at how we can create scalable real-time applications using the Node.js platform that is so perfectly suited for Comet, using the Tunguska library. The presentation will cover the use of streaming abstractions to minimize buffering. We will also consider the performance implications of topic-based publish-subscribe distribution versus filtering techniques.