Head of Developer Experience & Relations at Hookdeck
I gave a presentation yesterday at Edinburgh techmeetup . A big thanks to Dale Harvey for inviting me to talk and to all the attendees for taking the time to attend, listen and interact. Aaron Bassett also gave a good talk on Avoiding Integration Hell so I'd recommend you follow him for more info.
The real-time web started off by just being "cool"; a quirky and fun space to be in with lots of "cool" technology. People weren't sure whether it was just a fad, stimulated by hype. The value it delivers in the form of customer engagement, interaction, collaboration and the opportunities it can provide by being real-time is now much clearer, and consequently the benefits of using real-time technologies are beginning to be understood.
A couple of hours ago I was on a on the 'The Right Place At The Right Time: How The Real-Time Web Influences The "local" World' panel at the Local Social Summit . The panel was organised and chaired by Sebastien Provencher and also included RyanMacJones , Dave Ambrose and Stefano Diemmi . Here's the information about the panel and my thoughts on the questions that were asked.
I've just finished reading chapter 2 of Zoom! The faster way to make your business idea happen and to use one of Ian Sanders favourite words it really "resonated" with me and my experiences with Kwwika . Chapter 2 is entitled "The trouble with too much planning. How to unplan your business". I've been following Ian for probably around three years now and for around the last two he's been talking, tweeting , blogging and vlogging about unplanning your business.
I'm not answering this question directly in the post. I'd like people to ask questions and raise concerns in the comments and I'll then do my best to answer the questions and alleviate any concerns. I believe that WebSockets are ready for commercial use and I'll justify this stance in answering any questions. Look forward to hearing your questions and thoughts. View Q&A/Comments
With the arrival of WebSockets we finally have a standardised technology for true realtime bi-directional communication between a server and a web browser (or any other client). When we were creating our What are WebSockets? page we decided to write u...
Over the past 10 or so years I've written a lot of JavaScript. From very early on, at Caplin Systems , I had to write things in a way which ensured that code was clear, usable, discoverable, reusable, extensible and can easily built upon. One of the concepts that was used was to put code within a namespace. This ensured that you couldn't accidentally override a function in the global window namespace and also meant that the namespace would describe the sort of functionality contained within. I've continued to use this concept in various forms but just realised that I've never actually shared how I do this. So here goes. It's actually really simple. I've got two functions that I use, and I've recently ported over to the com.pusher namespace since I'm creating demos for my work (and play). The first creates some default namespace objects and then defines a namespace function that can be used from then on to create any other namespace objects. / @namespace Top-level namespace to stop namespace clutter. / if(!window["com"]) { window["com"] = {}; }
I value honesty, fairness and thoughtfulness above many other things. And I believe that the way I conduct myself reflects these values. I don't do this through any real thought process. It's driven by a physical feeling. It's difficult to explain, but I feel it in my chest. When I feel I've been treated unfairly I just have a sensation of unfairness, lack of care and thought. When I see others treated unfairly I have the same feeling. It annoys me, it makes me mad, and it adds to my drive to make sure that I am fair, honest and thoughtful. I want to treat others how I want to be treated.
In our last ASP.NET post, The easiest way to add real-time functionality to an ASP.NET e-commerce application , I demonstrated how to add realtime stock level updates and notifications to an ASP.NET e-commerce application. In this post I'm going to show how to add a "Who's shopping?" widget to the same application. The purpose of this widget is to show other users that interest in the product they are viewing is high and that, in combination with the realtime stock levels, will encourage them to make a purchase before the product sells out.
While adding realtime functionality to ASP.NET applications has often seemed difficult due to the connection limitations of the IIS platform, it can actually be achieved fairly easily by offloading this component to third party services like Pusher. In...