Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Website

Description

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 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 PubSubHubbub
* Build dynamic widgets on your homepage to show realtime updates from several sources
* Learn how to use long polling to "push" content from your server to browsers
* Create an application using the Tornado web server that makes sense of massive amounts of streaming content
* Understand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat service
* Use IM and SMS to enable users to interact with your site outside of a web browser
* Implement custom analytics to measure engagement in realtime

CONTENTS:

Preface; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari(R) Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Introduction; 1.1 What Is Realtime?; 1.2 Push Versus Pull; 1.3 Prerequisites; 1.4 The Rest; Chapter 2: Realtime Syndication; 2.1 Simple Update Protocol (SUP); 2.2 PubSubHubbub; Chapter 3: The Dynamic Homepage (Widgets in Pseudorealtime); 3.1 The Basic Widgets; 3.2 FriendFeed in Realtime; 3.3 Live Images; 3.4 It Was All a Setup!; Chapter 4: River of Content; 4.1 A Crash Course in Server Push; 4.2 Setting Up Your Cometd Environment; 4.3 A Realtime Live Blog; 4.4 Server-Side Filters (with Java); 4.5 Integrating Cometd into Your Infrastructure; Chapter 5: Taming the Firehose with Tornado; 5.1 Tornado; 5.2 Twitter’s Realtime Streaming APIs; 5.3 From the Firehose to the Web Browser; Chapter 6: Chat; 6.1 Setting Up the Basic Code; 6.2 Logging In; 6.3 Basic Chatting; 6.4 Acting Natural; Chapter 7: Instant Messaging; 7.1 Getting Started with Google App Engine; 7.2 Receiving Instant Messages; 7.3 Sending Instant Messages; 7.4 Responding Intelligently; 7.5 Setting Up an API; Chapter 8: SMS; 8.1 The SMS Landscape; 8.2 Building the Basic Application; 8.3 Sending and Receiving the Messages; Chapter 9: Measuring User Engagement: Analytics on the Realtime Web; 9.1 Realtime Analytics Services; 9.2 Customized Analytics; Chapter 10: Putting It All Together; 10.1 The Game; 10.2 Getting Set Up; 10.3 The Basic Models; 10.4 Building the Game Itself; 10.5 In Review; Colophon;