Why the hell is it so hard for me to determine wtf NowJS does?! All I can tell is it's a framework on top of Node and I can build a chat server in a few lines of code...
EDIT: Ok sheesh, I had to go to nowjs.com's frontpage to see it. The Docs page was less clear, which was the most obvious button to hit from the real time page.
I had the same issue, you might want to consider adding another top level menu item 'about' with a summary of what nowjs is and a quick overview of the how and why.
I agree. The website needs an "about" link in the top menu because the home/index page may not always provide that explanation, so I'm not necessarily going to click on the "nowjs" logo to go home. Fortunately, the nowjs home page does explain what it is and "about" can simply point to the index.
This looks interesting. We just made the decision to start developing our games exclusively with Node, just in the past few days actually. Are there any cool apps out that that you know of using NowJS?
Shoot me an email, darshan@flotype.com. We've got a bunch of games being built with NowJS + Node.js. You'll see a lot of hackathons having games built on that stack as well. Easy to rapidly prototype, build, scale etc.
I've always wished that there were more examples on the site on how to use NowJS other than Chat (seriously, 80% of websocket examples are of chat). Do you guys have any plans of adding more examples?
Ideally, winners of this contest should be posted as examples. But yeah, there will be more examples in the future. We've got a bunch created already, but the website as a whole needs to be redesigned.
I'm working on a pet project with nowjs and find it quite useful. What sucks is I started this a few weeks ago so I wouldn't be admissible for the contest. Nowjs basically kinds of adds an abstraction layer on top of socket.io and makes it easier to develop real-time apps.
It's especially useful if you need the concept of room. They have a multi-room chat sample which gives a good start. For example, this would be quite useful if you wanted to build a MMORPG game with different maps/rooms where each user is in a single room at a time.
I'm using it with the concept of rooms and instead of sending chat messages to users connected to a room, and send JSON messages of different types and based on the type of message received by the client, I use backbone.js to update the UI based on what's received. When a user's action affect other users' views, message a dispatched back to the room.
The only problem I see with nowjs is that if you need horizontal scaling, you would need a license for a more scalable version of nowjs that doesn't seem to be ready yet from their website. Since I'm thinking forward for my pet project, I wouldn't want to pay for this. I'm thinking to add a Redis pub sub layer to take care of horizontal scaling but would love to have access to their solution for this!
A single server running Now can easily handle 10-15k connections. The scalable solution you mentioned is called NowCluster. It is already in production-use by several companies, but has not been made publicly available.
Counter-offer: I work for you for 2 weeks, you pay me for those 2 weeks, at full market rate. If you're lucky I may award you a prize at the end of it. :P
Full disclosure: NowJS is an an open-source library that is built by the developers of Flotype (http://flotype.com). We are a commercial company.
That said, Flotype is not in the business of selling utilities such as games, collaborative whiteboards and other such things you might build at a hackathon. We write enterprise real-time web server software outside of the NowJS open-source software.
We do not derive any value from the hacks from this contest.
We are doing this because we like HN and the developer community and we want you to win some free stuff!!
The hackathon is two weeks long not so you can slave away for 2 weeks and "charge me" market rates. The extended deadline is to make the competition leisurely and not time-sensitive. Work on it 10 minutes a day after work. Work on it 5 minutes before the deadline. It's all fair game.
Please participate. We love hacking and winning free things. We think many of you will as well. =]
EDIT: Ok sheesh, I had to go to nowjs.com's frontpage to see it. The Docs page was less clear, which was the most obvious button to hit from the real time page.