Building Blocks of Real-Time Distribution

Back in July, I gave a talk about the "Building Blocks of Real-Time Distribution" at the GeoWeb 2010 conference in Vancouver, BC. It was pretty heavy on the buzzwords and the name dropping, so I created an accompanying page with links and definitions/background in order to make the slides a bit more coherent. The PDF itself also has a rough transcript of what I said in the talk, so that should help too.

In the talk, I attempted to cover the considerations and technology choices when implementing real-time services in various environments with different types of data. The talk focused on spatial data, but I think it remains relevant, with the exception of one or two slides.

I continue to pitch XMPP because I still think it's a good, if over-complicated, solution. Presence tracking and the ability to run ephemeral clients are seriously awesome features. However, the real momentum these days seems to be behind streaming HTTP APIs and PubSubHubbub. Julien and SuperFeedr have done a great job adapting to the changing landscape and shipping awesome features, so definitely check them out.

That is all.