Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites [Paperback]

Ted Roden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 14, 2010

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

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ted Roden was the first full-time developer hired on at Vimeo.com, and currently works in the Research and Development group at The New York Times. His work researching and prototyping topics closely related to the content of this book has been profiled by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab (http://bit.ly/f7rdJ http://bit.ly/YzELI). At the Times, he has also worked on bringing election night coverage, maps, and updates to the mobile website, as well as March Madness fantasy brackets. He is also the creator of a popular social bookmarking site: enjoysthin.gs.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (July 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596806159
• ISBN-13: 978-0596806156
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ted Roden is the founder of Fancy Hands, a personal assistant service. He is the author of Building the Realtime User Experience (O'Reilly). He previously worked as a Creative Technologist in the R+D group at The New York Times where he was on the team that built News.me. He built enjoysthin.gs and Blasted.app (acquired by Apparent Software). Before all that, he was a developer at Vimeo.com. He lives in New York City with his wife and two kids

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Coders Book, July 15, 2010

By 

Brett Merkey (Palm Harbor, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites (Paperback)

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This book is carefully named. Most "user experience" books tend to focus on usability and human interaction issues, "heat" maps and other techniques. The emphasis in this book is the first word in the title, "Building..." The book and its accompanying Web site of working examples has an exclusive focus on implementation.

"Building the Realtime User Experience" will guide, in very direct language, that developer who has just taken on the task of building a server push application.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book, highly recommended, October 27, 2010

By 

Ahmed Hussam (Egypt) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites (Paperback)

When I first got this book I was expecting a just another User Experience book, it turned out a very unique book that show you how to "build" a Realtime User Experience rather than just give theoretical ideas, complete with examples showing how to actually build the applications and integrate them into your website using several known programming languages and technologies.

I would definetly recommend this book for anyone interested in developing realtime applications for their site with basic development knowhow, the book focuses on Syndication, instant messaging, sms, realtime widgets, feeds, chatting, and lots more, really a very unique "other side" of User Experience that is a must to know if you want to have a 360 degree view of all technologies related to UX far from the traditional theoretical version, specially the real time stuff similar to Twitter and Facebook feeds and widgets.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!, July 21, 2010

By 

John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" (Pomeroy, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites (Paperback)

Do you want to build truly realtime web applications and experiences? If you do, then this book is for you. Author Ted Roden, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that shows you how to build applications and interfaces that react to user input and input from other servers in milliseconds, rather than waiting for web pages to refresh.

Roden, begins by focusing on the SUP and PubSubHubbub standards. Next, the author looks at realtime experiences on the frontend side of things with regards to dynamically updating your home page to show the latest updates long after the page had been loaded. Then, he shows you how to build a simple river of content feed, with regards to building applications that get the data to users as quickly as possible. The author continues by looking at speed and how to handle huge amounts of data. Next, he shows you how to exploit JavaScript and Tornado to build a fully interactive realtime chat application reminiscent of AOL Instant Messenger. Then, he shows you an example of how to integrate a web-based application with standard instant messaging protocols and programs. The author continues by stepping back from the desktop and venturing out into the real world. Next, he looks at a couple of new analytics packages that allow for monitoring your web traffic in realtime. Finally, the author shows you how to build a location-aware game that is designed to be played with a modern phone that supports geolocation JavaScript API calls.

This most excellent book assumes that you're comfortable with modern web application development, but makes almost no assumptions that you know the specific technologies discussed. In other words, rather than sticking with a simple technology, or writing about building applications using a specific programming language, this book uses many different technologies.