Note: For the tutorial we’ll use an application key that I’ve provided but for your own applications you’ll need to sign up to Pusher to get your own.

You can check that you’re connected in three different ways. You can do it manually by checking the Pusher Debug Console, if you load the page with the Pusher Debug Console open you’ll see the connection logged. The Pusher JavaScript library provides a log property that you can assign a function to and then you can manually check to make sure a connection has been established by inspecting the browser’s JavaScript console. Or you can check the connection programmatically by monitoring the connection state of the Pusher instance.

The Pusher Debug console

Whatever you choose to do, you’ll now be connected.

Subscribe

Pusher uses the Publish & Subscribe pattern, so to receive data from Pusher you first need to subscribe to it. Pusher uses the term channels when it comes to subscriptions, so let’s subscribe to a channel called ‘test-channel’.

As with connection state, you can check the status of a subscription in a few ways; using the Pusher Debug Console, by checking the output from ‘Pusher.log’ or by binding to the ‘pusher:subscription_succeeded’ event.

Using Pusher.log to log pusher-js library information

Bind to events

Those of you who use jQuery will probably be familiar with the idea of binding to events. jQuery does provide shortcuts for some events (e.g. ‘.onclick( )’) but you can also bind to events using ‘.bind(, )’. Pusher follows this convention and you can bind to events to be informed when something updates; when the connection state changes, when a subscription succeeds or when new application data is received. For this example, and with the realtime plugin, we’re interested primarily in the latter.

Let’s bind to a ‘test-event’ on the channel:

When binding to an event you simply identify the event by name and pass in a reference to a function that will be called when that event occurs (is triggered) on the channel.

If you have a Pusher account you can test that the ‘handleEvent’ function is called by using the Pusher Event Creator; enter ‘test-channel’ as the channel name, ‘test-event’ as the event name and some data (‘{ “some” : “data” }’) into the event data text area and click the submit button. You’ll then see the debug information, along with the data you entered, logged to the JavaScript console.

 

Triggering an event from the Pusher Event Creator and logging it in the JavaScript console

Since the realtime jQuery plugin that we’re building doesn’t publish (trigger) data (it just consumes it) we won’t cover that here. But if you’re interested in finding out more checkout the Pusher server docs.

Displaying realtime updates

The next thing to consider is displaying the realtime data updates to the user.

For this we’ll need an idea for a simple application; having worked in finance for a few years I’m generally keen to avoid any type of financial example, but Bitcoin has made it interesting and relevant. So, let’s create a very simple display for showing Bitcoin prices.

Note: We’re going to use some fake data. Let’s make sure this doesn’t result in more Bitcoin panic selling!

First, let’s create some HTML where we’ll display the realtime prices. We can pre-populate the display with prices known at the time the page was loaded:

Bitcoin Fake Prices
Last
Low
High
Volume
BTC/USD
61.157 USD
51 USD
95.713 USD
66271 BTC / 4734629 USD

Let’s update the JavaScript to subscribe to a more appropriately named channel called ‘btc-usd’ and bind to a ‘new-price’ event:

The ‘data’ sent to the ‘handleEvent’ function should also be in a more appropriate format – here’s the JSON:

{"last": "last value","low": "low value","high": "high value","volume": "volume value"}

Now that we know this we can change the ‘handleEvent’ function to update the appropriate cell in the table:

function handleEvent( data ) {var cells = $( '#bitcoin_prices tbody tr td' );cells.eq( 1 ).text( data.last );cells.eq( 2 ).text( data.low );cells.eq( 3 ).text( data.high );cells.eq( 4 ).text( data.volume );}

If you now trigger a ‘new-price’ event on the ‘btc-usd’ channel, using the JSON we defined, the page will update to show the new values.

There are ways of both making this code nicer and, as the page grows to show more data, optimise things. But, we’re going to make it so that realtime data will be added to the page simply by applying markup.

Before we progress, let’s first add a bit of styling to the example. In the ‘’ add the following CSS:

As you can undoubtedly tell, I’m no designer. So please feel free to improve on this.

The “styled” Bitcoin Fake Prices application

Finally, restructure things so we’re set up for building the plugin.

1. Create an ‘examples’ directory and within it a ‘bitcoin’ directory.
2. Move the ‘example.html’ file to ‘examples/bitcoin’, rename it ‘index.html’.
3. Create a ‘src’ directory at the top-level of the project.

The directory structure should now look as follows:

/
examples/
bitcoin/
index.html
src/

We’re now ready to define our realtime markup and build the realtime jQuery plugin.

Realtime markup

The first thing to highlight is that this isn’t a new idea — I worked for a company called Caplin Systems and in 2001 they had a technology known as RTML that let you markup a page so that realtime updates could be applied. The purpose here is to use jQuery to parse the page and then interpret the markup, resulting in subscriptions, event binding and ultimately live content being added to the page.

For our plugin we’ll use HTML5’s data-* attributes. These attributes don’t directly affect the layout or presentation of the page so they’re a great choice for our realtime markup.

The questions we now need to answer about the markup are:

• Where do we put the Pusher application key?
• How do we identify what channels should be subscribed to?
• How do we identify the events that should be bound to on a channel?
• How do we know what data to display in the page, and where?

The first one is relatively easy. Since we need to include our plugin JavaScript file we can add a ‘data-rt-key’ attribute to the ‘