
Rapid Development & Integration of
Real Time Communication in Websites
PyCon Kiwi’13
Chetan Giridhar

Facts
 Website developers focus
 Core functionality, Design
 User Interface, Performance
 Statistics
 About 38% customers agree that they made their
deals from the website due to engagement itself
 56% of the people prefer live engagement over email
or social media as preferred communication method
Could we make websites
better? Can Python help?

Demo

Development Considerations
 Asynchronous
 Real time exchange
 Full duplex communication
 Store chat information
 Easy to use APIs – think reuse
 Free and Open Source

Pure Python
 ws4py – python client library for web sockets
 tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler
class Socket(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
def on_message(self, message):
self.write_message(“Msg is” + message)
from ws4py.client.threadedclient import WebSocketCient
class Client(WebSocketClient)
def opened(self): self.send(“Hello”)
def received_message(self, message):
print “From server:” + message
open()
on_close()
closed()

Framework
Tornado Web Server
End User
asyncmongo/r
edis
Web Sockets / Ajax
Store Chat
Messages
Analyze and
generate patterns
feedback
HTML/CS
S

Live Chat – Ajax
function newMessage(form) {
$.postJSON("/a/message/new", message,
function(response) {
updater.showMessage(response);
});
}
class MessageNewHandler:
def post(self):
message = {
"id": str(uuid.uuid4()),
"from": self.current_user["first_name"],
"body": self.get_argument("body"),
}
message["html"] = self.render_string
("message.html", message=message)

Live Chat -Websockets
var url = "ws://" + location.host + "/chatsocket";
updater.socket = new WebSocket(url);
function newMessage(form) {
updater.socket.send(JSON.stringify(message));
}
class ChatSocketHandler:
def on_message(self, message):
chat = {
"id": str(uuid.uuid4()),
"body": parsed["body"],
}
chat["html"] = self.render_string
("message.html", message=chat)

Demo

Development
 Considerations:
 Ease of use
 Availability of service
 Point to point
 Tools
 Web Server: Tornado
 JavaScript: webrtc

What it means to Business?
 Better Marketing demonstrations
 Increased Product up sales
 Improved Customer Satisfaction Score
 Convert customer pain points to profits
 Competitive Edge
 Reduced Expenses – customer support time/telephone
 Did someone say more revenue? 

How can developers help?
 Commercially available
 Used off the shelf? – Often not
 Data in the desired format?
 To analyze and identify patterns
 Looks like I can develop it myself??!
 When are you building yours? 

References
 Market research: Forrester Research and Boldchat
 Demos hosted on http://heroku.com
 eAssistance Pro video on youtube.com
 webrtc-plugin http://freshtilledsoil.com/
 Free website templates from
http://WebsiteTemplatesOnline.com
 Tornado web server http://tornadoweb.org
 MongoDB www.mongodb.org

Questions?
Source Code
https://github.com/cjgiridhar
Blog
http://technobeans.com
Contact
cjgiridhar@gmail.com

Live chat demo -Tourism
Chat
Window

Demo…
User login
with gmail
(openid)
Cross
selling with
Chat

Video Chat – Interior Design