Question

We are currently working on an app that uses pusher.com to maintain a list of available people on our chat application.

Unfortunately, some of our users have IE < 10 (ie no websockets) and don’t have flash, so pusher.com will not work. Also, pusher is becoming more and more expensive for our usage (pusher is more for few connections with lot of data going through and we’re doing the opposite!)

So I’m looking for an alternative to pusher (either hosted or self-hosted) that will work on IE7+ with or without flash.

So far, here is what I’m considering:

• XMPP/BOSH
• socket.io (self-hosted)
• pubnub

As for the scale, we will probably have to handle 100+ messages per second and 10000 concurrent users. Nobody here has ever played with socket.io (or bosh), and we do not wish to have too much maintenance work (ie deal with many servers and such). So 2 or 3 self-hosted servers is ok, 10+ isn’t.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, some of our users have IE < 10 (ie no websockets) and don’t have flash, so pusher.com will not work.

This is incorrect. Pusher (who I work for) provide fallback for older browsers. HTTP-based fallback has started to be released to go alongside the existing Flash socket fallback. So, older versions of IE were already handled with the Flash socket fallback but the HTTP-based fallback will give near 100% browser coverage.

The November 2012 issues of the Pusher newsletter has the following:

We’ve always loved WebSockets, and since the beginning they have been our primary transport mechanism. While they are still the best way of sending data between applications, we do sometime have to resort to various trickery to negotiate troublesome proxies. By popular demand we are soon going to be bolstering our legacy support by adding HTTP based transport to our existing fallback options.

We have already deployed some provisional endpoints which apply in a set of limited conditions, and we’ll be continuing the expansion of this feature over the next few months. If you want to have early access to this as a beta user, please get in touch with [e-mail].

In terms of cost:

Also, pusher is becoming more and more expensive for our usage (pusher is more for few connections with lot of data going through and we’re doing the opposite!)

Have you contacted Pusher support explaining your use case? Discounts may be available.

So I’m looking for an alternative to pusher (either hosted or self-hosted) that will work on IE7+ with or without flash.

There’s a realtime web tech guide which has a good list of realtime web technology solutions (it’s on my site and I maintain it). If you want to support IE then a solution which offers HTTP-based fallback is the safest bet.