Tutorial: Async. and Realtime Geo Applications with Node.js

Node.js is a library built on Google's V8 javascript engine, which does non-blocking evented I/O via the libeio library. V8 is incredibly fast, (much faster than ruby/python) and can be used to create web-applications that can handle thousands of concurrent connections and real-time data. This tutorial will go through the process of creating an asynchronous and realtime geospatial web-app using the Node.js javascript server and bindings for the geo-stack. At the end of this tutorial we will have built a web application that can handle multiple client connections and a RESTful API to push data to a persistant storage such as PostGIS, Spatialite or MongoDB. The web application will allow multiple clients to be notified of updates posted in real-time using the API we built. The real-time communication be achieved using the HTML5 WebSocket client and server API written in Javascript. The workshop is aimed at people who wish to learn more about real-time, non-blocking geospatial web services and applications. We will also provide some insight into possible hosting of such web applications.