Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

node.js has real-time guarantees?

Exactly what I was thinking. This is the third recent post to HN using "real-time" in this fashion. They're hijacking a term which already has widespread use and which, "doesn't mean what they think it does," to hijack a line from Princess Bride.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

I use "real-time" in this fashion because describing it as "soft real-time" seems weird.

Didn't we call websites that update without a manual page reload "AJAX" just a few minutes ago? And yes, even if there's no XML present, but at least it's an abuse of a pretty new, web-specific term.

I propose we call all that stuff "FEFYOM" (Fast Enough For You Old Man) from now on.

If I ever write a manga with cute girls travelling the galaxy in a super-fancy ship, I'm going to name the ship the "Fefyom."

AJAX is where you click on something and then the page updates. Comet is where the page updates without the user having to initiate anything.

Source?

Fascinating...so wrapping an Ajax call inside a window.setInterval automatically switches it to "Comet"?

We should use the term "auto-synchronizing" insteaf of real-time

You know those journalist pages where they report what's happening at an event with immediate updates? It's called "live updating". Why don't we use that term? TV news stations say "LIVE" when it's current events happening now. "Real time" as used for this Ajax technique means that the page is auto-updating with events happening now. That's "live". Any seconders?

In fact, in Meteor, the relevant packages are called "livedata" and "liveui".

In the docs, Meteor usually tries to use the word "reactive" or sometimes "automatic," thought "realtime" does seem to have slipped in in some places.

What's a real-time guarantee?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Sure, anything using the Internet as a conduit, and having to scale to an unpredictable number of users, is incapable of a realtime-guarantee in the technical sense but in terms of user perception it will be real-time in normal conditions. Realtime-y. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com