Socket.IO and Realtime Applications with Guillermo Rauch

socket IO enables real-time bi-directional communication but what does real-time actually mean today's guest is guillermo rauch the creator of socket IO a widely used technology for client-server communication we discussed the nature of real-time apps like uber and Google Docs and we talked about the API and the usage of socket IO but before we get to our conversation with Guillermo we'll hear from a sponsor that keeps software engineering daily moving in real-time thanks for listening

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for free if you sign up automate your investing get back to the things that you can't automate like reading code [Music] socket IO enables real-time bi-directional event based communication guillermo rauch is the creator of socket IO Guillermo welcome to software engineering daily thank you Jeff

happy to be here web applications often get described as quote real time and this can mean a variety of things including just an empty buzz word you have said that we don't have a unanimous definition for that term real-time what is your own definition the traditional definition in terms of engineering is you divide systems into soft real-time systems and hard real-time systems however when it comes to the web people

have used the term real-time to mean a variety of things in the context of web applications in particular it's been tricky to define it so a lot of times applications have been called real-time when perhaps they update their data maybe every 20 seconds every 30 seconds as a matter of fact the original Google Docs that came through an acquisition

that Google made of a product called rightly I believe I think it is to update their data every 30 seconds and it did successfully achieve a certain level of real-time Nisour concurrency between the participants much better perhaps and you know emailing copies of Word documents as attachments but then later on a product called etherpad came and and I remember in their faq they said they were really real-time I would

like emphasis on really and they claim that they updated their data very frequently like perhaps between one and five seconds so over time as I was developing this ways of making it easier to create the systems that send data from servers browser and browser to server I realized that the definition that made the most sense was one that incorporated two things your application has to be able to self update which means there