1.
Realtime by proxy
Justin Karneges
justin@fanout.io
@jkarneges

2.
About me
●
Founder of Fanout.io
●
Livefyre, realtime commenting
●
Psi IM
●
Standards involvements (XSF, IETF)
●
Keywords: realtime, network protocols,
federation, open standards

3.
Realtime HTTP APIs today
●
Long-polling or streaming
●
Written “by hand” (for full control)
●
Possibly separate from non-realtime parts
●
Backed by publish-subscribe
●
Specific to vendor/application

4.
Today

5.
Pushpin
●
HTTP proxy server with realtime magic
●
Mongrel2 and ZeroMQ under the hood
●
REST interface for controlling
●
On GitHub: https://github.com/fanout/pushpin

6.
Architecture

7.
Address the bottleneck
(add proxy nodes, not app nodes)

8.
Generic Realtime Intermediary
Protocol (GRIP)
●
Open standard
●
Flexible enough for developing any API
●
Works with any web framework

9.
GRIP flow

10.
GRIP flow

11.
GRIP flow

12.
GRIP flow

13.
GRIP flow

14.
GRIP flow

15.
GRIP flow

16.
GRIP flow

17.
GRIP flow

18.
GRIP instructions
Content-Type: application/grip-instruct
{
}
"hold": {
"mode": "response",
"channels": [ { "name": "mychannel" } ]
},
"response": {
"body": "{}n"
}

19.
GRIP hold modes
●
●
response: publish whole HTTP responses
stream: specify partial HTTP response, then
publish HTTP body fragments

20.
Realtime is no longer “special”
●
Any web framework
●
Any endpoints
●
No need to split realtime/non-realtime
●
Existing facilities continue to work within a
realtime context (e.g. lovely Django error
pages).

21.
Future
●
Advanced use-cases, authentication, caching
●
More implementations (Nginx? HAProxy?)
●
GRIP for Websockets?

22.
Realtime by proxy
●
Email: justin@fanout.io
●
Twitter: @jkarneges
●
Pushpin: https://github.com/fanout/pushpin