Customer Reviews

Building the Realtime User Experience: Creating Immersive and Interactive Websites

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

§
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.

§

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.

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.

The Web is moving ever faster towards sites that give users what they want, not when they load or refresh pages, but rather in real time. Understanding how this works and how to leverage it on your own site so that it is useful to the user is important knowledge any developer should have. In his book, Building the Realtime User Experience, Ted Roden does just that.

Building the Realtime User Experience breaks down the technologies that make the most sense for a developer to deliver to the user in realtime such as syndication and instant messaging, for instance. One thing the book does that I appreciate is it presents the examples found throughout using different languages, applying the most practical language for a give scenario or toolkit. Doing this does not make understanding the examples very difficult, however, and any developer with reasonable coding skills should be able to follow along in any language without difficulty.

The first chapter gives an introduction into what "realtime" means in terms of the Web and development and lays out the languages the examples will use. From Chapter 2 on, the book jumps right into the different technologies that present well in a realtime format starting with syndication. Roden focuses on two technologies for syndication, Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and PubSubHubbub, giving each protocol pretty much equal treatment, leaving it for the reader to decide which protocol to implement. Chapter 3 discusses how to implement widgets that will display realtime on a web page, using Twitter and FriendFeed as examples. What was of more use was the discussion in Chapter 4 on server-side "push" technologies, and the transition into Chapter 5, which introduces the reader to Tornado - an excellent chapter that shows through example how to get Tornado running and in use on a site.

The next three chapters deal with chat, instant messaging, and SMS respectively. In each chapter, Roden gives examples on how to build an application around these technologies, which a web environment can then utilize. The chat application built throughout Chapter 6 is quite robust, as is the instant messaging client/server created in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 then extends the instant messaging service by integrating SMS into it.
I found Chapter 9 to be an interesting chapter, but it differs from the rest of the book in that it focuses on what a developer can do with analytics to view a site from an administrative point of view in realtime, instead of focusing on delivering something realtime to the end user. The examples yielded some interesting concepts and left me considering all of the possibilities for back-end development that I more often than not neglect or even disregard in my own development. Of all the chapters in the book, I think this one is the one I am most thankful Roden took the time to write. Roden finishes the book with a "Putting It All Together" chapter that takes the different applications built throughout the preceding chapters and mashes them together into a realtime game that could be pretty fun with a group of friends.

Overall, Building the Realtime User Experience is a terrific introduction into the realtime Web, and shows the reader just some of the technologies that may work well on a site. The examples are thorough and yield robust applications that are tweakable and integrate into existing sites. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in developing applications or widgets for their site that work in a realtime manner.