Ask HN: Review our product Beacon - a hosted Comet push service with WebSockets

[cgbystrom]

Hello HN,

We just recently launched our product, Beacon. Beacon is a hosted service for real-time browser messaging using WebSockets (with optional long-poll fallback for older browsers). It removes the troubles of hosting, developing, debugging your own Comet solution. We sort out the browser compatibility issues, so developers don't have to.

Features: * Hosted Comet service with WebSocket support * Cross-browser compatible clients for all major browsers (including iPhone and Android) * Easy to embed, plain HTML/JS * Uses a plain REST+JSON API * Scalable and hosted on Amazon EC2 * No monthly fees, only pay for what you use

As everything on the web becomes "real-time", we think a service like this is really helpful. Perfect complement to PaaS-services like Google App Engine and Heroku.

Feedback from you HN readers would be very much appreciated. What are your thoughts and what could be made better? As Beacon still is in beta, you can sign-up for free and try it out.

http://beaconpush.com

Thanks, Carl over at beaconpush.com

[mrduncan]

Looks like a pretty cool product, especially for those who want to add on small real-time features to their application but don't want to have to deal with evented servers/browser support/etc. I started looking into doing something very similar about a year ago based on having those exact needs actually (the project was eventually scrapped).

- The cost is listed as per million messages - what happens if I deliver 900,000 messages, what am I charged (if anything)?

- Care to share any details about your infrastructure?

- Have you thought about writing (and open-sourcing) a simple demo app, such as a chat room, to give people an idea of how everything works together?

[cgbystrom]

Thanks for your feedback!

1. Right now we offer up to one million messages for free. After that, we charge per each initiated million messages delivered. Meaning, if you send 900 000 you will be charged for 1 MM. Much how Amazon bills hours on EC2.

2. Well, sure. Our endpoint server (where all browsers connect) is written in Java. We're using the Netty framework, which we are incredibly happy with. Highly recommend it for doing high-performance networking in Java. Also, using the JVM instead of, say node.js, makes it very easy to utilize all our CPUs.

The user-facing website is implemented in our own framework called Planet. Developed in-house using Python with focus on real-time web sites. Both Beacon and Planet share the same underlying push technology and we have some major customers using it. You can read more about it at http://www.esn.me

The REST API is also implemented in Python and coordinates the message sending among our end-point servers. It's quite simple actually, just 200 lines of code.

3. Sounds like a good idea. It's just a few lines of code that's needed to integrate it. But yeah, a simple chat app hosted on GitHub would be helpful for newcomers.

-- Carl

[leggetter]

There are a number of similar services available and this is certainly something that should become commonly used over the next few months and years.

Other services are PusherApp, PubNub, Kwwika, Hookbox and WebSync on demand. I'm sure that more services will also pop-up over the next few years.

If you don't want to use a service you can always download, install and maintain your own comet server - but the whole point in a service such as this is that it removes the pain of doing it.

I've also heard rumours that Google App Engine will be adding native support for this. I believe Google already use the technology for things like the real-time news JavaScript API.