Real-time means something specific: every operation has a hard limit for upper bounded time.<p>I'm working on an embedded system right now; they typically cannot use garbage collection, because any GC pauses will utterly destroy the project's real-time guarantees. This board's microprocessor has an external hardware watchdog, which reboots the whole system unless I reset a timer every 2.5 msec or less. This is a reasonable limit, because if the program is unresponsive for too long, <i>people may die</i>. (It's automotive hardware.)<p>I think calling anything running in Javascript and across a network "real-time" is a bit misleading. What you mean is "soft real-time", which is far more forgiving.
<p><pre><code> And because the framework is based on Node.js,
developers don't have to worry about connection
issues or scale.
</code></pre>
Err, no. It might be better for open connections, but nothing is worry-free ever.<p>Also, I don't buy the selling point "hey this is a new tech so you don't have to learn any tech!". What is this rush to introduce new stuff to solve the problem of too many?<p>And why push it harder by stating not only the big guys can do this? Nobody should do it only because Twitter or Google do it.<p>It's not like I wouldn't use real-time solutions, but this article did sound like "let's find a use for this new thing."
I think Battlelog (<a href="http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/gate/" rel="nofollow">http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/gate/</a>), Battlefields community, running on real time framework Planet (<a href="http://www.planetframework.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.planetframework.com/</a>) is a good example on how real time web apps should be built. Client side rendering, live updating surfaces via "WebSockets". Nice to see this getting more coverage, I think it is a knowledge web developers must learn to master, or at least learn best practices for real time patterns. Interesting times indeed.
Meteor and Firebase and other novel web app frameworks are one thing... MMO Asteroids, or any multiplayer game, is another. Game developers have been doing multiplayer for a very long time; the frameworks promise to blur the line between client and server, but MMO Asteroids is still trivial with traditional client-server code, without any funky security model, making it a bit of an odd showcase.<p>Anyway, I doubt those frameworks have lag compensation (<a href="https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking#Lag_compensation" rel="nofollow">https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...</a>), so good luck avoiding jitter :)
I'd like to see a real-time OS that was an easy to set up and had the hardware and software support of Linux/BSD. Sometimes I want to be able to estimate how long a job is going to take.