Head of PLG and Developer Relations at Hookdeck
I can't believe it, but I've now been working for Pusher for a year. It's been an exciting year both in life and in business - and it's great when you spend a lot of the time working on something you are really interested in. So, I thought I'd push out a post covering the things that I've done this year along with a few thoughts.
Really pleased to see my realtime commenting system blog post appearing on Smashing Magazine. The post took a reasonable amount of time to write but I really like the way that the application is built from near-scratch and is progressively enhanced, first with AJAX and then realtime web functionality. Big thanks to Bryce Wilson of zendit.com for putting the HTML5, WebSockets (connectivity) and Pusher image together.</a></p> You can read the "How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System" post on Smashing Magazine now. And here's the tweet from @smashingmag: New on Smashing Coding: How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System - coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/09/bui… — Smashing Magazine (@smashingmag) May 9, 2012
Comet is an umbrella term for all the old HTTP-based hacks and is a phrase we want to get rid of. WebSockets are where we want to be; browsers and beyond. I’ve been thinking about writing about this frequently used statement for a while, and I’ve seen a few comments and discussions previously about this.
Over the weekend I attended the Code Africa hack weekend which was organised and hosted by The Times. The event saw developers, designers, journalists and entrepreneurs come together to try and form ideas and build prototypes over one weekend. My main takeaways from the event were a much better understanding of the state of technology in Africa, how technology can be used to help the people living within the continent and how realtime technologies can be used not only to improve application functionality, but also provide real impact in demonstrations and presentations.
jQuery is a funny thing; it's made JavaScript coding easy for advanced developers and accessible to web designers, and you could even say that the web designer role has very much changed because of it. It's made web interfaces much richer and interactive. But, it's also made us lazy because it's so easy to use. It's time to take a step back and start thinking about best practices. And sometimes that might mean not using jQuery.
Realtime location tracking Poll (I'm sure they'll introduce WebHooks soon) the Vodafone API and push realtime updates to a map. A better Betfair Ok, you probably won't be able to build an app that's better than betfair. But using our API in conjunction with Betfair you'll be able to build a realtime betting system. The questions is: can you get realtime data from Betfair? Things like realtime odds? Multiplayer Hangman A simple turn-based game. Take the ideas that Dan from Pearson spoke about and use Pusher to push those results to multiple users. Realtime context sensitive advertising Advertising tends to be pretty static once an application loads. Why not analyse how a user is using an application and dynamically push different adverts to their app… using Pusher :) Any questions please give me a shout. I'm @leggetter on Twitter.
When data is being delivered to web applications the chances are that you'll be displaying that data within the user interface (UI). In order to do this you need to find the element in the Document Object Model (DOM) and then update it. Whilst the performance of web browsers is improving all the time DOM manipulation can still be costly (use up time and resources) if you are pushing through a lot of data so it's worth keeping the interaction with the DOM to a minimum. You should also consider how you access the DOM. Should you use a utility/library function or should you use native browser methods?
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.
