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: 7 x 0.7 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #382,284 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

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

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

By Brett Merkey

Format: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

4.0 out of 5 stars Dives Deep on some Important Topics March 27, 2012

By Bluejack

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is not a survey work.

Ted Roden takes a smattering of use cases and dives deep, building non-trivial sample applications to demonstrate the how-to of adding realtime features to your web application.

The book will be exceptionally useful if you are using a technology stack similar to the author's (python and google app engine play critical roles), and have use cases similar to those explored in the book. Even without a good match, this is a very useful book simply because Roden really does understand his subject matter, and highlights the most important concepts to understand along the way. The writing is clear. The structure makes sense.

In organization, the book begins with chapters that build well constrained applications to demonstrate some basic patterns. Roden covers syndication (SUP, PubSubHubbub), basic browser polling mechanisms including explanation of JSONp and long polling, server side mechanisms for dealing with high concurrency and data throughput (Tornado), chat, IM, SMS, and Analytics. The book concludes with the building of a reasonably meaty game that adds authentication and geolocation to the preceding concepts.

These patterns cover a wide range of common realtime design problems, but they are not presented as a comprehensive survey of available tools and patterns. For the reader interested in grasping the range of possible tools, this will be a somewhat frustrating book. For the reader who has no intention of using Python or Google App Engine, there is a lot of material that at first seems skim-worthy. However, Roden's strength is in his pragmatic get-it-done approach. The details of his implementations are important, and his low-level discussions are a mistake to skip.

I could imagine a more useful book for the purpose of a systematic exploration of realtime technologies and patterns, but in the absence of such a volume, this one has a lot of wisdom for developers starting to dip their toes in the realtime waters.

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

Format: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.