Status update and roadmap

We’ve been really busy over the past few months, but haven’t been particularly chatty about what we’ve been doing. Several people have asked us what our current status is, so here’s a quick post about the work we have been doing and our roadmap going forward.

What we have been doing

We’ve spent much of January pushing the scaling limits of Pusher. This lead to us exploring several optimisations and a bit of a rethink of some architectural components. These changes have been made now, and we are very happy with the results. Our aim has always been to seamlessly scale horizontally to meet demand, and we believe that excelling at this adds a lot of value for our users.

Fixing bugs

We’ve also been busy investigating and fixing some issues people have been having. We recommend that everyone update to the latest stable version of our javascript file, which is 1.7. Please note though that the deprecation warning we wrote about in October is effective as of this version. This means that you cannot subscribe to a channel as part of the constructor function.

Beta feature

As well as the optimisations and bugfixes, we have also managed to make progress on a new feature we have in beta at the moment. This is the ability for a client to send messages to other clients without going via your server. We’ll be doing a more detailed post about this soon. However, if you’d like to try out the feature, drop us a line to support@pusherapp.com.

Presence improvements

Our ‘presence’ feature has been extremely popular, and we’re in the process of improving it in several ways. Initially we have focussed on optimising the amount of bandwidth consumed by channels containing large numbers of people. To support this we have made some changes to the client side API in pusher.js version 1.8.0 and we’ll be covering those soon.

Road map

Another popular request we get from our Pusher peeps is for us to start taking their money! We know that we have been promising to do this for a while now. The good news is that this is not through any lack of confidence in the system from a technical perspective. At this point we are happy enough with the stability of Pusher to recommend its use in production applications, and indeed many people have been doing this without any problems.

The main reason for delays have been administrative. However, we have also been extending our thoughts on how the plans could work, and what the possibilities are for giving custom packages suited to the different use cases we have seen. This means that we may change the plans in the future. If we do so, we will give everyone fair warning beforehand, and will honour agreements we have made with those who are already signed up. We’re aiming to get billing implemented pretty soon (I promise ;) ).

We’ve got some big plans for this year: some great integrations in the pipeline and more awesome features and improvements. We’re also going to be sponsoring events and travelling out to the US in March to SXSW and a week in California. Let me know if you’d like to chat to us while we’re there!

We’re really looking forward to the next year, and think this space is going to get really exciting.