One such promising technology is NowJS, an out-of-the-box architecture for real-time web apps.
NowJS uses the ever-so-trendy Node.js and socket.io to make it easier to build real-time web apps. Devs can use NowJS to build chat, news feeds, web analytics, video games, dashboards and more. It's a simple and lightweight technology for large-scale web apps.
In a chat in Mashable's San Francisco office, Darshan Shankar, one of the devs responsible for NowJS, said, "We've simplified the communication layer of really complicated web applications. The next Twitter or Facebook will use us, and they'll be a lot better for it."
Shankar's startup is Flotype. Based in Berkeley, California, the fledgling company is composed of three UC Berkeley computer science dropouts chasing the Web 3.0 dream. The co-founders include Eric Zhang and Sridatta Thatipamala, whom Shankar calls "truly genius hackers."
"Our value proposition is the technology," said Shankar, who emphasizes that NowJS isn't the kind of platform-as-a-service that might compete with Heroku or Joyent. "You can host your app wherever you want," he continued, adding that competitors with the two aforementioned powerhouses are "probably doomed."
Rather, the startup's business model is based on enterprise sales. "We're building a scalable, robust version of NowJS that runs on a cluster of servers," Shankar wrote in an email, "thereby allowing our customers to deploy applications facing millions of concurrent clients."
Flotype has raised a seed round and has a handful of clients currently.
To see how NowJS can be used to make a chat server in 12 lines of code, check out the video below: