Jeff Makes Software

Around the end of April, I put v11 of POP Forums into production on CoasterBuzz. Probably the biggest feature of that release was all of the new real-time stuff in the forum, with new posts appearing before your eyes and in the topic lists and such. This was all enabled in part by SignalR, the framework that allows for bidirectional communication between the browser and the server over an open connection (or simulated open connection, depending on the browser).

[This is actually a repost from my personal blog, but I think the technical audience might “dig” it as well.]

I wrote previously about how I built a "live blog" app in Azure, so we could use it for PointBuzz during last week's festivities at Cedar Point. Not surprisingly, it worked just fine. As I expected, the whole thing was kind of overkill. Sweet, over-provisioned overkill.

There are a lot of things that one can find satisfying about building stuff for the Web. For a lot of people, it's probably just the act of building something cool, pretty and useful. These are certainly things to strive for, but for me, the interesting thing has always been to build something that can scale.

If you're a technology nerd, then you've probably seen one technology news site or another do a "live blog" at some product announcement. This is basically a page on the Web where text and photo updates stream into the page as you sit there and soak it in. I don't remember which year these started to appear, but you may recall how frequently they failed. The traffic would overwhelm the site, and down it would go.

I'm not shy about telling people that I'm not much of a computer science kind of guy. It's not that I don't respect computer science or understand it, I'm just not one to get academic over it to the point of not building anything. And while I can't always remember what the hell SOLID stands for, I do remember that the "I" stands for the "interface segregation principle." It says, "Thou shalt not force everything to use one interface, because specific interfaces are better."

Get the juicy bits on CodePlex!

I won’t repost all of the changes here, but this is the version of the app that gets all real-time and stuff (thank you, SignalR!). I also spent some time refining the UI. You can get these naughty bits, and the overall change log, here: