[mcmc]

This is awesome! I released something exactly like it a few years ago, hookbox (MIT licensed): https://github.com/hookbox/hookbox/blob/master/docs/source/i...

Basic idea is this: You put all your real-time stuff in a message queue (MQ) which communicates directly with the browser. For authentication / authorization and various other forms of permission / logging, you have the MQ communicate with the web framework via http callbacks (Webhooks) and a standard REST API. So the architecture is:

User <--Websocket--> MQ :: publish/subscribe

MQ --Webhooks--> PHP/Django/Servlets/etc. :: user signed on, user joined a channel, etc.

PHP --REST--> MQ :: publish(msg), remove(user, channel), etc.

The key is to include cookie information in the callbacks from MQ -> PHP so the callback happens in the context of the user session. Suddenly you can do things like write a chat app in 30 lines of php + js, or a persistent time series in 20, and it really feels magical.

I actually started Hookbox almost as a statement of irony, because I was really frustrated about the major pushback I was getting to sockets in web browsers at the time. I'd just finished writing/submitting the initial proposal for Websocket, and I wrote this tongue-incheeck piece about the mismatch between typical web development and network server programming: http://svwebbuilder.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/html5-websocket...

So Hookbox started as a 2-3 day project that took on a life of its own for a while and ended up being really useful. This project was one of my smaller open source codebases and to this day I receive tons of interest and requests for maintenance, though I've abandoned it for years due to time.

I'm sure there's a huge market for this sort of thing. It's great to see Pushpin, I'll definitely check it out!