AgilityFeat to release book on Building Real-Time Web Applications

I’m very pleased to announce that our team is well into writing a book on how to build real-time web applications using WebRTC and publish/subscribe real-time messaging networks.

I’ve been presenting this topic to user groups for a while now using a tool that we built in NodeJS and which showcases real-time messaging and WebRTC code. The app is a simple but fun webinar tool, from which we present our slides, and audience members can vote on the slides and make comments in real-time from their mobile devices or laptops.

We’ve also built WebRTC into the app so that we can stream the presenter’s video and audio to remote attendees. In addition, we use WebRTC to setup video chats through the application with other members of our team so that they can also participate in the presentations from Costa Rica.

This project is most definitely a team effort. Allan Naranjo has been the lead developer on it, with help also from Andrea Phillips, Oscar Phillips, and Esteban Cordero from our team, and other developers on our team will also probably contribute code in the future. Daniel Phillips has applied his usual visual design wizardry to make the app responsive and great looking.

Our UX lead Mariana Lopez did the interaction design, and she has also joined me remotely via WebRTC video chats for the presentations to help explain the unique design considerations when building real-time applications. David Alfaro has also contributed to the concepts behind the application, and will be joining me at the HTML5DevConf in San Francisco in May to present on this topic.

The book will explain the most important concepts of real-time messaging and WebRTC, and then take the user through a tutorial to design and build the webinar application that I just described.

We still have work to do before the book is finished, but we’re getting great feedback already from our presentations. This is definitely a hot topic and so we want to make sure our book gives you all you need to dive into this bleeding edge development.

The book will be released at the end of April 2014, and you can go pre-order a copy or learn more about the book at RealTimeWeb.co.

In addition to our upcoming book, you might also be interested in the free weekly newsletter we edit on real-time technologies: Real Time Weekly.