Building Fillta – Express JS, NodeJS,WebSockets & Socket.IO – Thinking Realtime
February 3, 2013 Leave a comment
One of the things we’ve aimed for when Fillta was being designed is having everything as “real time” as possible. And before I go any further, let me define what is meant by “real time” in this context. I often see people use the term lightly for things that I’d never consider to be real time.
Realtime
My definition and for the purposes of this post, “real time” refers to the ability of the system to discover, process and distribute an item “as soon as possible”. As soon as possible could be within a second or two seconds, it could be within 30 seconds, any more than that and I’m inclined to think that it isn’t real time. The definition is further constrained to something people often don’t mention, relativity. When I say within 1 or 2 seconds I mean, if I publish this blog post now at 20:34:00, for my definition, a real time system is one that would detect and react to that by 20:34:02 or 20:34:30 at worse… Read more of this post