#channel api

I've been using app engine for more then a year and got kinda hooked on it. My advice to all planing to move to app engine is: " Be ready for mental shift :) " On glance, it could look kinda awkward with its limitations and hooks for every action imagined, but it make so much sense. I'd like give shoutout to my favorite features on Google App Engine backed with example of feature that supports it on Instaright:

out of box XMPP integration - I've used it to deliver Instapaper articles to user to users favorite chat client (i.e. gtalk)

Google Channel Api - use to deliver real time feed on Instaright article stream

Offline processing - all heavy data processing cron tasks, data aggregations and consolidations.

...

Note: All of these libraries are available for both Python and Java.

If you are still wondering what would be your next platform and if you are still evaluating upsides and downsides of platforms, I'd heartily recommend . Let me finish in Dave Mcclure style: stop BITCHIN' bout it and start working on it!

Many of today successful startup stories are totally different from first iterations. Twitter, Facebook are most popular examples and we can name more recent stories like Flowtown, Seesmic or others. These startups have been listening to user behavior, have stripped all unnecessary feartures and kept on iterating.

Lesson, here : It's all about pivoting.

Goal: Today we all live in time of "near" realtime data. Web is entering towards 3.0. Informations keep flowing thowards us at fast pace and was asking myself: Can I push instaright thowards realtime? Can I eliminate messaging latency and get closer to user?

As I've created instaright backend on top of the Google App Engine, I've been noticing that Google has tactics of creating APIs but not exposing it to public. Ie, Channel  API has been available on GAE 1.3.7, but it has not been pushed to public. This effecient way of letting users test ready product and discover possible hickups. One can fully test Channel API localy, but can push app to public. It is pretty neat and ubber smart move by Google. This topic deserves separate blog post. 

Channel API creates comet channel between sever and client and pushes messages from server to client, providing realtime message updates. This API is complement with Pubsubhubbub, which notifes callback url of latest feed updates.

Enough of Geeky stuff. Overall result is  instaright.appspot.com - Instaright Stream Updates. Instaright bookmarks of Instaright Users presented as stream of articles. Something, like Twitter for Bookmarks.

On right side, If you are interested in certain topic or domain , you can subscribe to them by sending invite to your jabber account by providing jid and pressing enter.

More info on using XMPP updates in upcoming post, which will be entirely dedicates to Instaright XMPP updates.

  In order to get picture of what is going on Instaright, check Instaright stats page, including  daily, weekly, stats per city and per country (thanks to all Japan users :), daily article volume. Check out more info in blog post regarded to Instaright Domain Stats.

Let's repeat once more it is all about pivoting and listening users, which means that this is not final version and that both instaright.appspot.com and instaright addon will keep on iterating.