Phil Leggetter – Software Consultant

Latest Updates: real-time web RSS

• When does NOW matter?

  Phil Leggetter 12:31 pm on March 10, 2010 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: real-time web, truly real-time (3), truly real-time web (4)

  Real-Time Web!

  Real-Time Web!

  Real-Time Web!

  Like me you may well be fed up of hearing and seeing this term. However, I’m guessing that you’ll be fed up for a different reason to me. I’m actually very excited about the real-time web (I’m sure you’ll have noticed) but I want to see it used as more than just a buzz term. I want to see real-time used in the true sense of the term – to mean that something has happened within the last few milliseconds. I want it to mean that the tweet you are reading, the picture you are viewing, the status update you are reading, the event you are being notified of is happening NOW.

  Google no longer takes days to index a web site or find a new blog post. For things like blog posts, new web sites, certain types of news and future events it doesn’t really matter if we only find out about them within hours of their availability. But with other things such as live events, breaking news and opportunities, seconds, and sometimes milliseconds, really do matter.

  When does instant real-time matter? When do you need to be informed that something is happening now? When do seconds, or even milliseconds, really matter?

  Here are a few examples that I can think of:

  • Live events – notifications related to live events completely lose their context if they are delivered too late. With live events seconds matter. If there is a system using the live event notifications, such as a betting platform them milliseconds matter. As soon as a goal is scored in a football match betting needs to be temporarily stopped until the odds can be updated to take into account the new scoreline. A good example of this is PickLive Football (previously Football 3’s).
  • Alarm notifications – If you have a system hooked into your house alarm, or a power system alarm then delivery of the alarm notification needs to be instantaneous so that it can be quickly acted upon. So, a firm such as AlertMe would probably be very interested.
  • Opportunities – If you check in to a cafe using a platform such as Four Square or Gowalla then there is a finite amount of time during which that location update will be valid. During that time there is opportunity for people to meet up with you. Another example might be that an unscheduled event is all of a sudden is taking place. Without instant notification of that event you would miss it.
  • Collaboration and communication – Good examples of this are instant messaging and Google Wave. I’m sure there are loads of other platforms out there where instant updates are required to ensure that people aren’t left waiting for a reply and don’t spend time composing a replies that are irrelevant or out of date.

  I’d love to get your feedback on this so please leave you comments and ideas below.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

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• Real-Time Web Posts 03/03/2010

  Phil Leggetter 9:12 am on March 3, 2010 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Facebook (2), html5, real-time web, Real-Time Web News, Social Media (7), Twitter (64), websockets

  I’m doing my best to keep up to speed on any news related to the real-time web. I follow interesting people on Twitter who tweet out links, I subscribe to RSS feeds and I’ve got Google Alerts set up on a number of phrases. Since I’m doing all this work I thought it would be a good idea to start sharing it by publishing the findings in an occasional summary blog post. I generally don’t like blog posts which just say “this is an interesting article” but sometimes, if it raises awareness of good articles, it can be useful. Hopefully it will be.

  I tend to first post the links on the Real-Time Web Software and Technologies LinkedIn group so if you are interested on getting the news as I find it, or contributing your own real-time web finds then please join the group. Also feel free to Tweet at me or contact me via the website if you find anything interesting and relevant.

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• Using real-time web software and technology to distribute events

  Phil Leggetter 11:08 am on February 27, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: cloud (2), comet (3), pubsubhubbub (2), PUSH, real-time web

  I’ve just come across William Vambenepe’s blog and an article called “Waiting for events (in Cloud APIs)“ where he discusses how an event system is missing from cloud vendor APIs.

  With my interest in Comet I straight away thought of this as a solution to the notification requirement and it’s interesting that the article goes on to talk about subscription management and then moves on to thinking about the delivery mechanism which are all key aspects of a good comet implementation:

  How do you deliver notifications? Do you keep HTTP connections open through tricks similar to how self-updating web pages work (e.g. COMET, long polling and soon WebSockets)? Or do you just provide a listener endpoint to which the notifier tries to connect (which, in the case of public cloud deployments, means you need to have a publicly-addressable listener, but hopefully not on the same Cloud infrastructure). Do you use XMPP? AMQP? Email? Can I have you hold my events and let me come pull them?

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• Thoughts on the TechCrunch ChristmasCrunch (#xmascrunch)

  Phil Leggetter 12:59 pm on December 22, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: real-time (5), real-time web, xmascrunch

  Last week I attended the TechCrunch ChristmasCrunch which came with the tagline “It’s a realtime holiday”. It’s great to see so many companies embracing the real-time web and building their businesses around it. Some companies that you would still class as start-ups such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and tweetmeme are now relatively established and there were a dozen or more startup pitches with the majority of these new companies focusing on the real-time web.

  There’s so much data being generated by social networks that it wasn’t surprising that a lot of the focus was around analysing the data. The key words from the event in relation to the data were relevance, sentiment, curation, authority and location. All of these terms play off each other. Relevance can be determined by authority and location. Sentiment, relevance and authority can be determined by a curation process. Some solutions to curation pitched at the event were based on language and text analysis, whilst others suggested crowdsourcing and using manual intervention as a means of determining the quality of data.
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• How does Google Real-Time Search work?

  Phil Leggetter 2:18 pm on December 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Ajax (2), Google (3), JavaScript (6), Le Web, real-time (5), real-time web

  On or around the 12th of December 2009 Google released a feature they are calling “real-time search”.

  Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

  Although I’d still argue that we’re not seeing the real-time web with this solution I thought I’d go in to a bit of detail about how Google are achieving this HTTP polling solution.

  Summary

  • Google are consuming and indexing real-time data from multiple social networks
  • It’s not real-time HTTP PUSH yet, it’s HTTP PULL using a polling interval
  • The polling interval seems to vary but this needs to be confirmed.
  • The polling result returns an encoded JSON response containing the next request to be made and the HTML of any new results. These results are injected into the “Latest results” section of the page
  • The HTML returned is quite verbose and could be refined
  • 87% from a sample of 30 polled requests returned no new results meaning the request was a waste of resources

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• How real-time does real-time have to be?

  Phil Leggetter 9:37 am on December 9, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: real-time web, Social Media (7), truly real-time web (4)

  Last night, just over 12 hours ago, I attended the Gary Vaynerchuk Crush It event organised by Sprouter in London. I’ve already read Crush It and seen a lot of Gary online so I wondered if he would give out any information that I hadn’t already heard. On the way in I mentioned this to Ian Sanders who said:

  It’s always different live. It’s like a gig.

  This is a big statement considering the event is just a guy standing and speaking and taking some Q&A. However, Ian’s statement was spot-on. Gary oozes charisma and when he speaks it feels like he’s addressing you directly. This is clearly one of the reasons why he’s so popular and doing so well.

  

  Gary Vaynerchuk at the Sprouter Crush It event

  
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• The ChristmasCrunch nearly real-time web event

  Phil Leggetter 10:07 pm on December 1, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ChristmasCrunch, real-time web, RTRIA (4), truly real-time (3), truly real-time web (4)

  On the 15th of December I’m going to the ChristmasCrunch. It looks like a really good event with Iain Dodsworth and James Whittaker of TweetDeck giving the keynote on “Where the biggest realtime desktop application goes next” (I know where I’m hoping it goes. See below). Other presentations include Jenni Lees of Festbuzz, Marco Kaiser of Seesmic, Mario Menti of Twitterfeed, Mark Rock of AudioBoo, Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme, Daniel Tenner of Woobius, Willian Fischer of Twitter Jobsearch and Tim Morgan of Mint Digital. And if that’s not enough there’s also a startup pitch (startup pitches – grrrr…) and an after party.

  My main interest in this event is to see if anybody is going to start delivering a “truly real-time” experience to users. Will TweetDeck still be making polling requests to the various services it uses to check if any more data is available or will they move to using PUSH technology? Are other companies going to start adopting PUSH to give the user a truly real-time web experience?

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• Why Comet is key to the Truly Real-Time Web

  Phil Leggetter 9:01 pm on November 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: comet (3), http polling, http streaming, real-time data (6), real-time web, truly real-time (3), truly real-time web (4)

  A lot of websites use HTTP Polling to update data on on their website or application without the need for the user refreshing the website. This is clearly better than a purely static page, but during the time between each poll the data on the page has the potential of being out of date (stale) so to make a decision based on the information on a potentially stale page can be a risky one.

  The normal example given to show the benefits of using Comet to achieve full HTTP streaming and the importance of non-stale data is of a trader making a trade on an out of date price. Another example is given where a person places a bet using odds that are on screen but do not match up with the odds in the betting system.

  I just read a post on Comet Daily about a company called Frozen Mountain who have just released a component that adds Comet Support for IIS. Along with this they’ve released a video which doesn’t cover the standard example.
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• Which Rich Internet Application Technology will dominate?

  Phil Leggetter 1:34 am on November 7, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Ajax (2), flash (2), Flex, JavaScript (6), PHP (2), real-time data (6), real-time web, RIA (2), silverlight (7)

  I’ve been a member of the RIA Developers Group on LinkedIn for a short while now and the other day Patrick Bay posted a link to an interesting article on Computer Weekly about the prominence of RIAs. A few comments were posted and then Patrick questioned which RIAs would “bubble to the top”.

  I think the UI revolution’s already here; now we see which ones bubble to the top!

  This got me thinking about the criteria that may determine which RIA technology would be most successful.

  I think there are a number of things that will determine which one will ultimately win, or at least become the dominant choice. At the moment I can think of three categories; Technology buy-in, Development environment and Data access capabilities and choice.
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• A Real Time Rich Internet Application (RTRIA) Example

  Phil Leggetter 8:12 pm on November 3, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: MSDN (2), real-time (5), real-time data (6), real-time web, RTRIA (4), silverlight (7), Twitter (64)

  I’ve just had an article published in the latest UK MSDN Flash newsletter on How to consume real-time data in a Silverlight RIA. As part of writing up the article I developed a sample Real-Time Rich Internet Application (RTRIA) that consumes real-time data from the Twitter real-time data feed. I also put together my first ever screencast. So, you can start by getting hold of the code or watching the screencast.

  The Code

  First, and this is Important:

  To get the sample application to stream real-time data from the Twitter real-time feed you will need to use Fiddler to trick Silverlight into allowing a crossdomain Web Request.

  Now that you are aware of that, you will also need the Silverlight development environment. You can get everything you need via the Silverlight Getting Started page.

  You’ve now got everything you need to run the RTRIA example. To run the sample application you should set the MSDNFlashRTRIAExample.Web project as the startup project and the MSDNFlashRTRIAExampleTestPage.html page as the startup page.

  

  Setting up the solution to run the application

  If you’d like to find out a bit more about the code then read on. If you’d rather jump straight into the code you can download it from the TweetStreamer Google Code project.
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