Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive
and Interactive Websites
Reviewed by Robert Leigh Pritchett
|
Author: Ted Roden
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596806163/
Released: June
2010
Pages: 320
$35 USD
ISBN-13:
978-0596806156
Strengths:
Provides coding for instant gratification in making websites interactive.
Weaknesses: None
found.
|
|
Introduction
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
What I Learned
In light of the ongoing demand by government to control all
aspects of Internet communications http://blogs.ajc.com/bob-barr-blog/2010/06/21/government-pushing-to-control-internet/,
the information I gleaned from reading this book is rather bittersweet
regarding immediate interactivity for websites and mobile devices. The first
thing to go will be the Internet, followed by cellphone activity in any
contrived or real national crisis, when martial law is invoked (it has happened
before) - http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5919860-how-to-survive-the-coming-martial-law-in-america
and you probably have read the most recent information regarding the
ever-widening intelligence net designed as the 4th arm of
government, to watch our every move - http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/map/.
So you can perhaps get a sense of my reticence in wanting to do the constant
connectivity everywhere mode, in anticipation of garnering gobs of money due to
hyperactivity on my website. In fact, I am going the other direction and
personally shutting down, as I go into self-protection mode instead, due to the
current political and economic situation.
This book helps us design and build push functions for
websites. It helps put the interactivity into interactive sites by demonstrating
how to reach out and touch anybody who is essentially using mobile devices to
communicate.
Conclusion
If you do not believe as I do, that there will shortly be
some major changes going on that are detrimental to or liberty and freedom
online, then by all means, get this book and play the social networking game.
Go ahead and make it easy for the intelligence communities to know everything
there is to know about you, your tastes and what you think. The walls have ears
and now so does everything else around you. What you see online is also recorded, and will be
used against you.
Fair warning.
