Tonight I’m giving a guest lecture for a class on web development in Python. I’m talking about building real-time web sites using Hookbox. It draws on my experience building the software version of the Groovik’s cube. Here are the slides from the lecture:
Here are the slides from the talk.
I start out talking about the need for keeping a web page up to date. I talk about polling as a natural but expensive solution to this. Then I talk about how COMET works, a.k.a. hanging GET or long polling. Then I talk about the difficulties of building a COMET stack from scratch and why you shouldn’t. Then I talk about moving to a higher level of abstraction with hookbox and what a publish/subscribe pattern is. Then I build a demo app using hookbox for a simple web chat. The source code for the web chat example is at https://github.com/leopd/hookbox-demo.