Building the Realtime User Experience

Getting Set Up

The setup of this application involves signing up for different services and acquiring some API keys. We’ve already used several of these services this book. For services that you’ve already set up, you can either reconfigure the service to work with this new application or start fresh with each one.

We’ll be using a number of different technologies to build this application and even hosting it on two different servers. To set up the environment, we’re going to want to create a couple of directories. Assuming you’re keeping this project in your home directory, open a terminal window and enter the following commands to create the basic directory structure of this project:

~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/appengine
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/appengine/static
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/appengine/templates
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/tornado
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/tornado/templates
~ $ mkdir ~/ipandemic/tornado/static

Google App Engine

This application uses two different methods to host the code, the first of which is Google App Engine. Chapter 7 includes a complete explanation of how to sign up for and configure an App Engine account. You can easily reuse the account and application that you previously used. If you are going to set up a new application, you should configure it through the interface on the App Engine website and then set it up locally. Each App Engine application must have a unique application identifier, which are becoming increasingly hard to find. ...