Get into the holiday spirit with this fun hack by Tropo developer Anthony Webb. This video demonstrates how you can hack your G-35 Holiday Lights by mashing them up with Arduino, Tropo, Nodejs, and a little dash of Ruby code. It also shows the speed of Tropo’s scripting engine using TCP sockets. This allows for extremely low latency, as opposed to simple web callback methods.
In a previous post and screencast on this blog, I demonstrated an example application that highlights some of the more unique features of Tropo to support realtime applications.
In a number of previous posts on this site, we’ve talked about the unique nature of Tropo to support persistent sockets for real time applications.
As promised in a previous post, this entry will conclude a series we started over on the Phono blog discussing an effort to build a remote call center solution in JavaScript.
Over on the Phono blog, we’re doing a series of posts on a new project to build a remote call center solution with Phono and other JavaScript components.
Have you been itching to try out Node.JS for a real-time communication app? Perhaps a voice application? Or a SMS or IM agent? Or a Twitter-bot? Did you read about our Node.js library for the Tropo Web API released back in October and think “That would be a cool way to learn Node.js!” But have been put off by not having a server on the Internet where you could run your Node.JS apps? (more…)
Here at Tropo, we understand the need for speed.
Consider that in the last few weeks we’ve written one, two, three, four blog posts covering different ways to leverage the unique nature of our scripting platform to build blazing fast, real-time communication apps.
And the promise of speed is one of the things that has us so excited about Node.js – the server side framework for writing JavaScript applications.
We’re constantly adding new features to our Node.js library for building Tropo applications. Just this week we added support for the new Tropo REST APIs that allow you to provision phone/SMS numbers and IM addresses for your apps, and for injecting events into running Tropo apps.
And we’re also working on other goodies to make it easy for Node.js and JavaScript developers to build cutting edge, multi-channel communication apps. You’ll be hearing more about these in the weeks ahead, in future blog posts.
Node.js is a good candidate for applications that have high concurrency or low latency requirements because of one of it’s chief characteristics – it’s non blocking. When you ask Node.js to perform an operation, it does not wait for the completion of that operation before executing subsequent instructions. This lets you write more efficient (faster) applications because you don’t have to wait for the completion of a specific operation before doing something else.
Node.js is also event-based rather than thread-based. This makes it different from other web technologies (like Apache) that spawn new threads to handle concurrent connections. Node.js uses an event loop instead of threading, which provides a much more efficient approach to concurrency. This makes Node.js particularly well suited for applications that have lots of connections that are non-trivial in length – like real-time applications.
There are add-ons and libraries for other languages that provide a similar construct to building event-based apps; Twisted in Python, EventMachine in Ruby or AnyEvent in Perl.
With Node.js you don’t need to use an external library – events are baked in. (more…)
We continue our focus this week on ways to create real-time interfaces for your users via Tropo for phone calls, instant messaging, SMS and Twitter. As promised in my recent blogpost, WebSockets with Tropo, I would like to build upon Chris Matthieu’s XMPP with Tropo post by throwing BOSH into the mix.
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