Building the Realtime User Experience

In Review

This application takes a good number of the technologies that we’ve discussed in this book and puts them together in one more or less cohesive application. While we started from scratch to build this application, there is no reason why a developer couldn’t take a single part and incorporate it into her application.

Adding a chat based on long polling can be done from almost any server setup; if it’s not directly supported, firing up a simple Tornado web server on a separate port will certainly do the trick. The SMS integration on this application is a small extra feature—the application would certainly work without it—but having it there enhances the user’s experience. Likewise for Instant Messaging, this addition can easily be done by firing up an App Engine instance and responding to a few API calls.

Having these technologies in your application is pretty easy—small steps, but the end result is that users can interact with your application in drastically different ways. As the web increasingly moves away from the desktop computer, it’s important that your application can respond in every way your users expect. Depending on your application, there is a good chance that users would start interacting with your application more frequently, and hang around longer, if you gave them the means to do it on their own terms.