realtimeconfeu-blog

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Welcoming Microsoft's Windows Azure!

As you know, every good restaurant makes amazing food because they have greats Chefs. We're excited to introduce our Chef sponsor: Windows Azure!

Azure is a cloud computer and infrastructure that runs your web app written in ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js, but also allows you to run virtual servers running either Linux or Windows.

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Google will sponsor the Realtime Web Conference Europe

We're thrilled to have Google come as a sponsor to the Realtime Web Conference Europe.

For the longest time, Google has been at the tip of the Realtime Web, pushing technologies like SPDY, PubSubHubbub or more recently, WebRTC.

We are also very excited to be welcoming Sam Dutton, one of the developer advocates on Chrome come tell us about the wonders of WebRTC.

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RealtimeConf: in the words of attendees and speakers (by &yet) I don't think you were looking for another good reason to come, but that would obviously be one :)

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These guys may very well be the first ones!

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Realtime Design

Jan-Christoph is both an open web advocate and a true interaction designer. He'll share with us his vision of how we, developers can communicate the realtime experience to the users of our software.

Less focused on the technological part, but on the underlying human factors. What does realtime mean for users, how is it perceived, how can we design for it?

You’ll learn about fundamental psychological principles which help you to better design for realtime. The difference between the software being perceived as sluggish or snappy is often just a matter of realtime feedback.

I’ll also discuss the pitfalls and consequences of what realtime enables: What about distractions caused by data flowing in all the time, notifications, incoming shiny new things which are hard to resist – can we handle that in the software we create short of just pushing it out to people?

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Quick Wins with Redis For Your Website

Redis is often times synonymous with speed when it comes to datastores. Its complex datastructures also make many web apps faster and the PubSub capabilities also make it the datastore of choice for many realtime web apps.

Catherine Jung is a huge Scala advocate and as she tries to convert everyone to it, she also found that Redis could bring huge benefits to any web app:

I’d like to talk about where you can slide Redis into an existing website for amazing performance gains. As an example, I’ll show our in-play sports betting software in its original incarnation using just a plain Postgres database, ajax and Comet in Scala, let people load it up and see the performance (which was already good), then show some very quick and easy changes we made to increase our Comet distribution performance so much that it was too quick to measure, scaled tens of thousands of times better, and was even more reliable and easy to extend than the original implementation, yet looked identical (and the front end didn’t even need to know about).

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Enemy of the State: An introduction to functional reactive programming with Bacon.js

Callback hell is dreaded by anyone doing evented javascript code. The asynchronous IO approach is at the heart of many realtime frameworks, but yet, it often leads to the most frequent argument against these architecture: callback hell.

Philip Roberts will show us how to prevent that in Javascript with Bacon.js (yummy!)

Trying to deal with realtime data and user interaction in the browser with callback after callback after callback quickly leads to madness. This is because application state is being modified all over the place by different callbacks, which makes applications complex and hard to reason about.

Functional reactive programming is a powerful concept borrowed from Haskell that makes events much easier (and fun!) to work with, by turning them into event streams which can be mapped, merged, filtered and more. Bacon.js (https://github.com/raimohanska/b...) by Juha Paananen is a lovely little library that implements FRP in JavaScript.

In this talk I'll introduce the concepts of FRP and Bacon, and show how much nicer it is to work with than callbacks for realtime code. It will be a very visual talk using some visualisations of event streams that I am working on (http://latentflip.github.com/bac...) as well as some live code examples.

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James Coglan: Securing your socket apps

Security is very often overlooked by developers when creating fancy new web apps. Yet, this is one of the few things which could eventually not only bring a business down, but maybe even get you to face a lawsuit.

James Coglan is a developer at Songkick. and he'll tell us how we can secure WebSockets and the likes.

Although people have been hacking messaging systems on top of HTTP for years, it's only since the arrival of WebSockets and EventSource that the idea has become mainstream. As ever, new web technology means new attack vectors that developers must be aware of.

By adding realtime messaging to a web app, you are opening your site up to a host of potential security problems, including CSRF and XSS. While working on the pub/sub framework Faye, I've tried to make it easy to keep your application secure but you still need some knowledge to apply the available tools correctly.

In this talk, I'll discuss the security problems with socket-based applications and explain what you can do to avoid these pitfalls, whatever socket library you're using.

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Realtime Opportunistic Networking using ZeroMQ

Pieter Hintjens is one of the creators of ZeroMQ so he'll clearly be one of the best to talk about it :)

Attendees will learn cutting-edge techniques of distributed computing, using the ZeroMQ messaging library. We'll build a fully peer-to-peer WiFi chat application live during the session. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops and join in the live coding session.

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Tyler McMullen: Realtime vs. Real world

Fastly is an unsung hero of the realtime web. Created by the voracious speed addict Crucially, they provide a realtime CDN to many of the most popular web applications that we love.

Tyler McMullen will tell us how they built that and how they deal with the imperfection of the world:

Writing and running globally distributed systems that have realtime requirements is extremely challenging in the face of the real world. In the real world, there are net splits, packet loss, kernel-panicking servers, not to mention the simple fact of latency. Fastly runs several systems that must behave in a realtime manner. I'll talk about how we work around these problems to provide global realtime systems that millions of people rely on every day.

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Learning How To Let Go: Improving performance with binary data-interchange formats and protocols

Kyle Drake participated to all Realtime Confs so far! He's been one of the true groupies and he'll now get to be on stage. Until recently he worked for Geoloqi, a started which combined geolocation and realtime and eventually got acquired by ESRI.

At Realtime Conf Europe, he'll tell us about about formats and how to improve the thruput of your API using stuff like Protocol Buffers, Message Pack and BSON:

Human readable formats like JSON have become very popular in recent years, and it's no question why. There is something very comfortable about being able to take the data going through your system, and just paste it into a text editor or console to work with it, and easily read it.

Binary formats and protocols used to dominate computing, mainly to deal with limitations in the bandwidth and CPU constraints. As our machines and internet connections (compared to the modems of the past), many have opted to accept the trades off of being "human readable" and easier to work with, at the cost of some inefficiency.

However, this is not always a good tradeoff. As we start dealing with the challenges of increased popularity of large-data services, it becomes important to find ways to minimize the amount of data "boilerplate" needed to transfer information.

I will introduce some of the concepts of both binary formats (like MessagePack and BSON) and transport protocols like Protocol Buffers, and show how to easily use them in your systems. I will also show novel ways to simultaneously provide both binary and JSON output for your APIs, giving your developers an efficiency improvement choice that does not require a lot of changes to your code, and do not neccessatily make the data harder to work with.

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Realtime and Go: Leaving the Frameworks Behind

When Google introduced Go a couple years, expectations were high as to whether this new language would fit the modern web's requirements in terms of ease of development and scalability.

Paddy Foran will show us at Go is actually a great match for all Realtime web things.

Attendees will learn to build realtime web systems in Go, from enabling raw push functionality to creating a scalable system for realtime applications, and all the challenges in-between. We’ll survey the current landscape of tools that the Go community has created to build realtime applications with, discuss the gaps, and suggest next steps.

There is a lot of excitement about the realtime web, and frameworks are created for it, but there doesn’t seem to be much on the topic of how to build production-ready systems without buying into a framework. This talk is an attempt to remedy that. It focuses on building scalable systems with discrete pieces, rather than being constrained by a framework.

Tools included:

websockets

SPDY

go-socketio

nsq

wendy

pusher.go

IronMQ

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Offline first!

Jan is a friend of the Realtime Conf family. He's one of the great inspirers who led us to jump in these cold waters :)

Yet, he is also a very smart hacker and builds on amazing things. One of his latest "madeleine de Proust" is how our browsers and their 'offline' capabilities can make the web faster and better! Come discover PouchDB and Hoodie.

Realtime is good, offline is better: in a network, the computer with the lowest latency is always localhost. Making use of this fact is not built into modern web technologies. Browsers go furthest here, but most backend web frameworks don’t play well with this.

It is time to rethink this. Luckily the field of distributed computing offers a plethora of solutions here. The problem usually is, though, that it is all too fucking complicated. This talk will briefly introduce the past and present approaches to solving seamless data access in distributed systems and where they fall flat for simple web programming.

It will conclude with an introduction to PouchDB, a synchronising database for your browser and Hoodie, a web application framework purely for the frontend that takes all the lessons we learned to heart and empowers frontend developers to build and run offline-first web applications.

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Amelie Anglade will speak at The Realtime Conference Europe

We're thrilled to resume our speaker's announcements with Amélie.

[photo courtesy of Thomas Bonte]

Amélie, who is currently at SoundCloud will tell us about DiscoRank: a smart algorithm used to sort users, tracks, sets... but she describes it better than I do!

When Alexander Ljung presented the Next version of SoundCloud in December 2012, he introduced our improved search and the brand new Explore section. Those two features share a common algorithm to boost relevant results: the DiscoRank. Inspired by the PageRank, it extends its principle to the full graph of searchable entities (users, tracks, sets, etc.) in which each activity on SoundCloud is an edge connecting two nodes. The discoverability ranking of each node is then computed using the weighted graph of entities and activities. > We are dealing with millions of nodes and edges so in our first implementations the DiscoRank was taking several hours to converge. We trimmed the computation down to a few minutes. To that end we optimized how the full graph is stored in memory, with a tailored sparse representation. Using versioned copies of the DiscoRank we can both swap between them when testing things out and compute the most recent DiscoRank starting from results of previous runs, only adding the new activities to the graph.

In this talk we will describe the DiscoRank algorithm and how it is integrated to search backend and adapted to the time-sensitive requirements of the Explore section. In particular we will elaborate on how it was optimized for speed and memory size to serve the user sounds that emerge from the latest trends.

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2013 Realtime Europe— In Lyon, France! http://realtimeconf.eu/ (by andyetfilms)

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Mandrill as a sponsor!

We’re thrilled to announce that the Realtime Conference Europe is now sponsored by Mandrill.

Mandrill is a transactional email solution provided by the folks at Mailchimp.

As part of their sponsorship, they’ve decided to give away to tickets to the community. If you want a free ticket for the conference, please follow us on Twitter, as we will announce the challenge there in the coming days :)

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Simon Tennant at Realtime Conf Europe

Simon is a good friend of ours and we share the same hope about an decentralised open social web. His effort, [Buddycloud](http://buddycloud.com/) relies on the XMPP realtime protocol to let friends share and interact online. When I asked about the details of his talks, he came up with this: > Everything you need to know to build your own distributed, federated social network. With working examples, code and realtime demo.