NowJS: simplifying development of real-time apps
Channel: Robert Scoble's Building 43
Date: 29/07/2011

Whether it's videoconferencing, online gaming, chatting or any number of other uses, there is a growing demand for real-time apps. The problem is they can be extremely challenging to develop. Flotype is making it much easier with its NowJS software, which uses emerging technologies to help clients and servers communicate in real-time.

"Real-time web technologies is kind of this abstract notion, and people have wanted to do it for a very long time," explains Darshan Shankar, Founder and CEO of Flotype. "But there's an emergence of technologies these days like Node.js and web sockets that have enabled us to build this really cool technology to enable other developers and companies to build extremely cool products."

The free version of the product has been available for a few months, and Flotype has seen uses range from chat to real-time analytics to financial dashboards.

"Anything where you have data that is changing and events that are occurring," says Shankar, "and you want that to have some sort of result on client side browsers, mobile phones or whatever it is—you want to basically show these changes happening on both sides, but you want it to happen in real-time. It was possible to do these things before using existing technologies, but those technologies are antiquated, pretty old, and [they're] just too hard to use. With NowJS, it's easy to use, it's scalable and we're using next generation technologies, and we're providing this really stable, secure, reliable framework and infrastructure for you to use in production."

Now is free to download, and scales up to 10,000 concurrent users. There is also an enterprise version called NowCluster, which scales to millions of concurrent users. The software adds a small piece of middleware to both the client and server sides, which allows communication to go both ways, and everything is Javascript based.

"At the end of the day, the beauty is that it doesn't matter for you, the developer, if it's four data centers across the country or across the globe," says Shankar, "or if it's one server in your garage, the entire API operates the same way. Your code doesn't have to change, because we've abstracted that layer out...We're just talking about a communications layer inserted between your clients and your servers to enable you to build an entirely new class of applications really easily. The power is that you don't have to worry about scalability of our software—it just works."

More info:

Flotype web site: http://flotype.com/
NowJS blog: http://blog.nowjs.com/
Flotype profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/flotype