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  • The death of "F5" Ah, I get it!

    Phil Leggetter 10:47 am on July 22, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    I recently did an interview about Kwwika with Jane Adams for Innovation Focus Scotland. We chatted about what Kwwika offered, what our costing model is (or will be), what competition we have and how we will differ from that competition. I also responded to a questionnaire that Jane sent me which asked questions about innovation in Scotland and what the challenges that being based in Scotland were.

    The following day I was looking through our website stats and noticed a few hits from an article on the Innovation Focus Scotland site with the title “The death of F5“. It honestly took me about 10 seconds of repeating to myself “the death of F5″, “the death of F5″, “the death of F5″ and then I twigged. When discussing Kwwika to Jane I explained real-time push using a common scenario:

    When you go to a website with “live” information, such as a sports scores or frequently updating news site, and you want to check to see if things have updated you quite frequently refresh the page every so often, using the “F5″ key, to see if any new information is available. If that website used Kwwika the website user wouldn’t need to refresh the page. That page will always be up to date, to around 500 millisecond, with any new information that has been pushed through Kwwika and into the web page.

    Sometimes I’m so engrossed in the technology that even though you use this scenario all the time, to highlight a simple and fundamental benefit to the user of real-time push, you forget just how beneficial it is to the user experience. It’s a pretty simple concept and it really will lead to “the death of F5″ since there will be no need for a user of a standard website to refresh the page once real-time push is introduced to it. F5 will be left to be used by developers who want to check the impact of their code change on their web page or application. Will the refresh button disappear as one of the main buttons in a web browser?

    A big thanks to Jane for the article and for reminding me about a fundamental benefit of Kwwika and real-time push.

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  • Basic Authentication against the Superfeedr HTTP PubSubHubbub API using a .NET HttpWebRequest

    Phil Leggetter 10:58 am on July 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,

    It would appear that setting the Credentials property of a HttpWebRequest still leads to authentication failure against the Superfeedr HTTP PubSubHubbub API. This might be because the way the HttpWebRequest works is that it first waits to be challenged for credentials via a 401 (not authorized) and then replies with the authentication (more info include PreAuthenticate here).

    So, this doesn’t work:

    string username = "username";
string password = "password";
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("url-here");
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(username, password);

    To work around this you need to force the authentication to be sent. I found the details of how to do this in a blog post by Ian Dykes here:

    http://devproj20.blogspot.com/2008/02/assigning-basic-authorization-http.html

    But for fullness here’s the code:

    string username = "username";
string password = "password";
byte[] authBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(username + ":" + password.ToCharArray());
request.Headers["Authorization"] = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(authBytes);

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  • Want to try out the Kwwika API but don't want to register?

    Phil Leggetter 10:28 am on June 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    We’re try to get more and more people using Kwwika and we feel that registering is maybe a barrier to entry. So, we’ve decided to give everybody access to our service. The only caveat is that we’ve just enabled access from your local development machine, assuming you can run a local application from http://localhost.

    So, if you want to try out the Kwwika JavaScript API but don’t want to register (yet), then go ahead. There’s a topic that you can subscribe and publish to named /KWWIKA/SANDBOX.

    You can even start building a Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App because we’ve give http://localhost access to the data you need to use to enter the competition:

    • /OPTA/WC2010/TEAMLIVE
    • /KWWIKA/TWITTER/SEARCHES/WC2010/*

    If you need help getting started you can of course get in touch or start by going through our Real-Time Web Workshop. This workshop contains a presentation, a set of exercises and all the files (download) that you need to go through the exercises. This even in includes and executable webserver to run on windows, a webserver app to run on Mac and a python webserver to run on Linux (or any other python enabled machine).

    So, why not start developing using Kwwika now. And if you like it, or are just damn good at developing real-time push apps, why not register and enter our World Cup 2010 competition.

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  • The Real-Time Web World Cup Experience

    Phil Leggetter 4:41 pm on June 13, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: BBC, Fifa, ITV, , ,

    A number big players have come up with pages or applications in an attempt to draw World Cup fans into either combining using a laptop whilst watching the live games on television or using the application as their main view into the World Cup. The problem is that nobody has got it quite right. With a live event the data that you see in your World Cup web application needs to be correct with up to the second information or it loses its value. None of the big players have managed this. The data also needs to be relevant and of good quality. The Twitter application fails in this respect.

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  • Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App - Apple iPad competition

    Phil Leggetter 12:49 pm on June 11, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Competition, ,

    To celebrate the start of the World Cup 2010 in South Africa we’re very excited to announce our Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App – Apple iPad competition sponsored by TellyLinks.com.

    We are opening up a competition to give all you web developers the chance to win an Apple iPad with Wifi 32GB by creating the most engaging and “cool” real-time push web application using Kwwika. Let your imaginations run wild and mash up the data you receive from Kwwika in real-time with other sources of data such as Google Maps, You Tube, Google search, Flickr or any other API you can get your hands on.

    We’ve created a very simple real-time push World Cup 2010 demo to give you an idea of the type of things you could create. We’re sure you can do better! View the demo.

    At the moment we are pushing real-time updates from Twitter but we have a MASSIVE announcement to make when we will be adding real-time updates from a major sports data distributor. Follow Kwwika on Twitter to keep updated.

    Still here! What are you waiting for? Get started building your Kwwika World Cup 2010 Real-Time Push Web App and win an iPad.

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  • Chrome/Safari (webkit) + real-time push = always loading indicator

    Phil Leggetter 10:42 am on June 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Chrome, , Safari, Webkit

    With real-time push becoming mainstream more and more developers are going to start adding real-time push to their website. One minor user experience hurdle still to be fully solved for webkit based browsers is the “always loading indicator” which can appear if a streaming connection has been established to a push server or service. This indicator appears due to the streaming connection that has been established between JavaScript in the web browser, using an XMLHttpRequest object, where you are effectively continually loading, or waiting, for content from the push server.
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  • Add real-time news to your site with Google. Add any real-time data to your site with Kwwika

    Phil Leggetter 10:05 am on May 18, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,

    It’s been revealed that Google are going to release a version of their API that supports Real-Time news push. Real-time push technology has been around for ages and there are a number of technologies that allow you to host your own real-time push server. However, more recently hosted solutions have come about. Kwwika is one of these solutions.

    However, why restrict yourself to just news updates when there are services such a Kwwika that allow you to add real-time push containing any data to your website!

    If you have data that you want to push your data in real-time then you can use Kwwika to easily and instantly distribute your data to thousands of users. This can be great for showing the quality of your data and proving you use the most up to date technologies to give your data consumers a massive advantage. If you want to add real-time data to your website then you can easily subscribe to data and have it update instantly in your website.

    Why not get in touch with Kwwika or sign up for the beta programme and see how you can either real-time push your data or add real-time push to your website, Rich Internet Application (RIA) or desktop application.

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  • Kwwika Silverlight API - Chat Example

    Phil Leggetter 7:30 pm on May 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    This video shows a chat application built using the Kwwika JavaScript API and a chat application built using the Kwwika Silverlight API. Both applications can communicate with each other in real-time using the Kwwika service.

    We'll release the source code for both applications in the very near future.

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  • Kwwika Silverlight API - Chat Example

    Phil Leggetter 6:30 pm on May 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Chat, Example, , , , ,

    This video shows a chat application built using the Kwwika JavaScript API and a chat application built using the Kwwika Silverlight API. Both applications can communicate with each other in real-time using the Kwwika service.

    We'll release the source code for both applications in the very near future.

     

  • Anybody fancy a real-time web workshop?

    Phil Leggetter 12:33 pm on May 4, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply

    What?

    I’m doing a real-time web workshop on May 16 for the SPA 2010 Conference and I’d like to do a trial run with a group of around eight people to get feedback and refine it some more. Details about the workshop can be found here:
    http://www.spaconference.org/spa2010/sessions/session303.html

    In the workshop we’ll discuss the real-time web and the enabling technologies, highlight the comet/server push technologies that are presently available, and use the Kwwika service to show how to:

    1. Add real-time data to any web page
    2. Create a better real-time search results page
    3. Add real-time publishing from a web page
    4. Create a real-time collaboration and communication example

    If there is sufficient interest I’ll try and sort out a venue next week. The workshop will probably take around 3.5 hours so I’ll need to sort out times once I get an idea of interest. I’ll try to keep the presentation side of things to a minimum and concerntrate on discussion and development exercises. For this we’ll need internet access and a computer for development. It may also be a good idea to pair during the exercises.

    Where?

    Edinburgh or Dundee during the week beginning Monday 10 May 2010.

    Anyway, please give me a shout if you are interested. Or if you would be interested but don’t have that much time to spare maybe we can do a shortened version.

    phil@kwwika.com

    http://www.leggetter.co.uk/contact-me/

     

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