Lightweight, Cross-platform, Real-time Browser-Browser Communications

During a monthly meeting to discuss cutting edge technologies here at the Biodiversity Informatics Group at the Marine Biological Laboratory, I demonstrated a technique to update distributed browsers in the face of collaborative classification (i.e. tree) editing. In essence, if there are 2+ people asynchronously (i.e. via AJAX calls) updating content on a web page, there is potential for everyone to get horribly out of sync with one another. Imagine for example a chat window on a web page that does not update on everyone's web page in real time....wouldn't make for a particularly pleasant or useful experience for anyone. The same lousy experience was true in the LifeDesks tree editor when 2+ people were simultaneously updating the same classification. Person A might delete or move a node and person B, C, D, ... etc. are none the wiser and might later perform an action on that node (or its children) whereas the database no longer reflects what they see in their browser screen.



To work around the possibility that everyone editing can get horribly out of sync with one another, I implemented a polling mechanism to grab recent adjustments to data every 5 seconds. If you happen to be looking at a portion of the tree that someone else has just deleted or moved elsewhere in the tree, relevant nodes within the tree will now automagically refresh to reflect actions that someone else just did...nodes will flash red then disappear, nodes will flash green then appear, etc. There is also a scrolling activity monitor at the bottom of the screen. To be sure, this isn't a particularly robust mechanism because there is constant polling. Enter web sockets...


Ryan Schenk who attended this informal demonstration alerted me to Socket IO. I knew of it, but never paid much attention. However, after having poked around a little bit with the examples provided, I am convinced this is the way I should have designed real-time classification tree updates in the face of 2+ simultaneous user actions. The lightweight technique will prove useful for any client-client communications (e.g. real time chat). Plus, it has the excellent benefit of cross-browser, cross-platform capabilities with very little server strain. A database need only be hit once when person A exerts an action and the data propagates to all other users. Very cool.