Short Version: Hookbox is a message queue built specifically for browser clients. Whenever a client connects, subscribes, publishes, etc. Hookbox makes a Webhook request (HTTP callback) to obtain permission for the action from the web application (PHP, Django, etc.) All server-side app logic therefore remains within the web framework/language.
Very cool stuff, hopefully.<p>To quote the beginning of the "What about my web app?" section<p><pre><code> This ten step tutorial shows how a client can interact with Hookbox.
Adding web app integration is also trivial.
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I can tell you, combining a real-time component with your existing web app framework is not trivial; hopefully Hookbox might change this. In general, a framework that eases this pain is very needed.<p>I experimented with these ideas with my project "Hotdot" (<a href="http://github.com/clemesha/hotdot" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/clemesha/hotdot</a>), which is mostly a "big example", not a framework or whatever.<p>Hotdot uses Orbited (which was originally authored by Michael Carter, and who is also the author of Hookbox). Michael did contact me with the Hookbox project a while back, and it looks as though he has made significant progress on the project since.
Saw a demo of this at the last jquery meetup, very cool stuff, and the guy demoing it actually coded a live chat app from scratch so everyone could see how its done. The fact that they also have a hosted solution for people to try hacking against gives them a big a+ in my book. Great job.