

NowJS Real-time Trials: Build a 2-week hack, win sweet prizes - sthatipamala
http://nowjs.com/rtt?y=true

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sausagefeet
Why the hell is it so hard for me to determine wtf NowJS does?! All I can tell
is it's a framework on top of Node and I can build a chat server in a few
lines of code...

EDIT: Ok sheesh, I had to go to nowjs.com's frontpage to see it. The Docs page
was less clear, which was the most obvious button to hit from the real time
page.

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dshankar
Ah thanks for the feedback! We'll work on a better designed website to be more
clear.

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michaelbuckbee
I had the same issue, you might want to consider adding another top level menu
item 'about' with a summary of what nowjs is and a quick overview of the how
and why.

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jinushaun
I agree. The website needs an "about" link in the top menu because the
home/index page may not always provide that explanation, so I'm not
necessarily going to click on the "nowjs" logo to go home. Fortunately, the
nowjs home page does explain what it is and "about" can simply point to the
index.

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JTxt
NowJS vs SocketStream? (<https://github.com/socketstream/socketstream>)

This is the closest I found to a comparison:
[http://groups.google.com/group/socketstream/browse_thread/th...](http://groups.google.com/group/socketstream/browse_thread/thread/4533180d89e21b40)

Is it current and correct?

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mkramlich
Counter-offer: I work for you for 2 weeks, you pay me for those 2 weeks, at
full market rate. If you're lucky I may award you a prize at the end of it. :P

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iag
Oh yeah? I have an offer and a prize on the table, when do you want to start?

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hobonumber1
Details or it never happened. :]

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james33
This looks interesting. We just made the decision to start developing our
games exclusively with Node, just in the past few days actually. Are there any
cool apps out that that you know of using NowJS?

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mcantelon
Also see:

[http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous-
Remote-M...](http://substack.net/posts/85e1bd/DNode-Asynchronous-Remote-
Method-Invocation-for-Node-js-and-the-Browser)

Here's a comparison (tldr: they both have interesting aspects):

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5317282/what-is-the-
diffe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5317282/what-is-the-difference-
between-dnode-and-nowjs)

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hobonumber1
I've always wished that there were more examples on the site on how to use
NowJS other than Chat (seriously, 80% of websocket examples are of chat). Do
you guys have any plans of adding more examples?

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dshankar
Ideally, winners of this contest should be posted as examples. But yeah, there
will be more examples in the future. We've got a bunch created already, but
the website as a whole needs to be redesigned.

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cubicle67
Reading through the examples and docs and I think this looks very interesting.

Anyone here have any experience with it?

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jeromeparadis
I'm working on a pet project with nowjs and find it quite useful. What sucks
is I started this a few weeks ago so I wouldn't be admissible for the contest.
Nowjs basically kinds of adds an abstraction layer on top of socket.io and
makes it easier to develop real-time apps.

It's especially useful if you need the concept of room. They have a multi-room
chat sample which gives a good start. For example, this would be quite useful
if you wanted to build a MMORPG game with different maps/rooms where each user
is in a single room at a time.

I'm using it with the concept of rooms and instead of sending chat messages to
users connected to a room, and send JSON messages of different types and based
on the type of message received by the client, I use backbone.js to update the
UI based on what's received. When a user's action affect other users' views,
message a dispatched back to the room.

The only problem I see with nowjs is that if you need horizontal scaling, you
would need a license for a more scalable version of nowjs that doesn't seem to
be ready yet from their website. Since I'm thinking forward for my pet
project, I wouldn't want to pay for this. I'm thinking to add a Redis pub sub
layer to take care of horizontal scaling but would love to have access to
their solution for this!

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dshankar
A single server running Now can easily handle 10-15k connections. The scalable
solution you mentioned is called NowCluster. It is already in production-use
by several companies, but has not been made publicly available.

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jeromeparadis
That's good to know. If my app ever needs it, it will be a nice problem to
have.

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horofox
I'm gonna win dat, everybody just should just quit.

Making a MMO with nowjs, cya.

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dshankar
Good luck! Tweet or email the NowJS mailing list with your progress over the
next two weeks

