4 ms·

Build a realtime liveblog with RethinkDB and PubNub

nacs 11y ago
Using a locally-hosted database to send a realtime feed up to a remote Pubnub server to have Pubnub send data back down to your visitors seems unnecessarily complex. There are plenty of standalone websocket (relay) servers if your language of choice doesn't implement Websockets well. Also if you're using nginx, you have built-in modules like pushstream that can handle it from the nginx side. Considering the biggest selling point of RethinkDB is to provide realtime updates faster than other solutions, putting Pubnub is not just slowing the real-time system down but adding extra monetary cost.
- segphault 11y ago
  Most of the demos that we publish at RethinkDB use Socket.io or some other similar WebSocket abstraction layer, catering to cases where the user wants to fully host the entire application from end to end. But scaling a Socket.io application is not trivial, there are users who want a hosted solution for realtime streams so that they don't have to worry about their application falling over if they get too many simultaneous connections. Granted, the case in the blog post is perhaps a bit contrived. But consider, for example, a scenario where you take a single page web application, deploy it to a CDN, and have all the realtime traffic that it accommodates routed through PubNub's infrastructure. You could make it so that no traffic is hitting your own servers, and you are just broadcasting updates into the PubNub stream from your RethinkDB-based backend. That would be pretty trivial to scale. And in terms of the speed at which the messages are routed, for the purposes of a liveblog or something of that nature, pushing everything through PubNub isn't noticeably slower than using Socket.io. Of course, nobody's saying that you should always use PubNub. As I said, we often use Socket.io ourselves. But I do think there is legitimate value in presenting it as an available option.
  - harlanji 11y ago
    > But scaling a Socket.io application is not trivial, there are users who want a hosted solution for realtime streams so that they don't have to worry about their application falling over if they get too many simultaneous connections. PubNub employee here, I agree, this is the reason. > And in terms of the speed at which the messages are routed, for the purposes of a liveblog or something of that nature, pushing everything through PubNub isn't noticeably slower than using Socket.io. We aim for 1/4 second global latency (averaging 151ms currently http://status.pubnub.com/ http://status.pubnub.com/). Great demo!
cdnsteve 11y ago
While I love technical articles such as this it saddens me there is always a gap providing a working example. All code an no visuals mean most people won't try it. Please give us a URL to play with, or at minimum, animated gif to see this. I often find this with well written technical articles, open source projects, etc. Folks are excited to go over code detail but never show us the demo. You'll get more uptake since the hard work is already done!
- TheMissingPiece 11y ago
  Hello :) I work on the community team at RethinkDB and we're working with PubNub to host a meetup here in the bay area where we'll do a live demo and presentation of this blog post. We record all the talks, too, so hopefully we'll get this going sometime soon. Definitely understand where you're coming from though.
  - cdnsteve 11y ago
    Hey right on, thanks for that. It's a great read and can't wait to see it in action :)

nacs 11y ago

Using a locally-hosted database to send a realtime feed up to a remote Pubnub server to have Pubnub send data back down to your visitors seems unnecessarily complex. There are plenty of standalone websocket (relay) servers if your language of choice doesn't implement Websockets well. Also if you're using nginx, you have built-in modules like pushstream that can handle it from the nginx side. Considering the biggest selling point of RethinkDB is to provide realtime updates faster than other solutions, putting Pubnub is not just slowing the real-time system down but adding extra monetary cost.

segphault 11y ago
Most of the demos that we publish at RethinkDB use Socket.io or some other similar WebSocket abstraction layer, catering to cases where the user wants to fully host the entire application from end to end. But scaling a Socket.io application is not trivial, there are users who want a hosted solution for realtime streams so that they don't have to worry about their application falling over if they get too many simultaneous connections. Granted, the case in the blog post is perhaps a bit contrived. But consider, for example, a scenario where you take a single page web application, deploy it to a CDN, and have all the realtime traffic that it accommodates routed through PubNub's infrastructure. You could make it so that no traffic is hitting your own servers, and you are just broadcasting updates into the PubNub stream from your RethinkDB-based backend. That would be pretty trivial to scale. And in terms of the speed at which the messages are routed, for the purposes of a liveblog or something of that nature, pushing everything through PubNub isn't noticeably slower than using Socket.io. Of course, nobody's saying that you should always use PubNub. As I said, we often use Socket.io ourselves. But I do think there is legitimate value in presenting it as an available option.
- harlanji 11y ago
  > But scaling a Socket.io application is not trivial, there are users who want a hosted solution for realtime streams so that they don't have to worry about their application falling over if they get too many simultaneous connections. PubNub employee here, I agree, this is the reason. > And in terms of the speed at which the messages are routed, for the purposes of a liveblog or something of that nature, pushing everything through PubNub isn't noticeably slower than using Socket.io. We aim for 1/4 second global latency (averaging 151ms currently http://status.pubnub.com/ http://status.pubnub.com/). Great demo!

cdnsteve 11y ago

While I love technical articles such as this it saddens me there is always a gap providing a working example. All code an no visuals mean most people won't try it. Please give us a URL to play with, or at minimum, animated gif to see this. I often find this with well written technical articles, open source projects, etc. Folks are excited to go over code detail but never show us the demo. You'll get more uptake since the hard work is already done!

TheMissingPiece 11y ago
Hello :) I work on the community team at RethinkDB and we're working with PubNub to host a meetup here in the bay area where we'll do a live demo and presentation of this blog post. We record all the talks, too, so hopefully we'll get this going sometime soon. Definitely understand where you're coming from though.
- cdnsteve 11y ago
  Hey right on, thanks for that. It's a great read and can't wait to see it in action :)