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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

Looks neat, but I can't really think of a real world application for it other than some debugging of API's. It's basically polling-as-a-service. The hashtag about the real time web is a joke, right?

Please, don't turn it into some kind of SAAS, that would ruin everything. I'd be willing to pay a license fee on a stand-alone app, not a monthly fee on a tool I'd use once every few months.

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The socket.io example server is 6 lines: https://github.com/socketio/socket.io

A polling loop is 4-5? I guess that's everything minus the WEB Gui.

As other comments point out, there are significant benefits to having a streaming endpoint over a polling logic. It conserves resources, provides a more elegant representation with an events based interface to act on incoming data.

A latent benefit of Heartbeat (which we will start emphasizing soon) is an ability to filter the incoming stream of events by the JSON data properties, so one can build nice IFTTT style code using any REST based APIs as sources. We are leaning towards creating a monthly and a longer-term pricing plan, but if your use-case is casual, then it will always be free. We are able support the current load of requests with a single worker process.

I still can't get over how many 'technologies' are still just 'something else does the polling so you don't have to'.

Trying to arrange a polling-in-sixty-seconds universal-protocol in a .. well.

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