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How to achieve realtime updates on my website (with Flask)?

I am using Flask and I want to show the user how many visits that he has on his website in realtime.
Currently, I think a way is to, create an infinite loop which has some delay after every iteration and which makes an ajax request getting the current number of visits.
I have also heard about node.js however I think that running another process might make the computer that its running on slower (i'm assuming) ?
How can I achieve the realtime updates on my site? Is there a way to do this with Flask?
Thank you in advance!

Well, there are many possibilites:
1) Polling - this is exactly what you've described. Infinite loop which makes an AJAX request every now and then. Easy to implement, can be easily done with Flask however quite inefficient - eats lots of resources and scales horribly - making it a really bad choice (avoid it at all costs). You will either kill your machine with it or the notification period (polling interval) will have to be so big that it will be a horrible user experience.
2) Long polling - a technique where a client makes an AJAX request but the server responds to that request only when a notification is available. After receiving the notification the client immediately makes a new request. You will require a custom web server for this - I doubt it can be done with Flask. A lot better then polling (many real websites use it) but could've been more efficient. That's why we have now:
3) WebSockets - truely bidirectional communication. Each client maintains an open TCP connection with the server and can react to incoming data. But again: requires a custom server plus only the most modern browsers support it.
4) Other stuff like Flash or Silverlight or other HTTP tricks (chunked encoding): pretty much the same as no 3). Though more difficult to maintain.
So as you can see if you want something more elegant (and efficient) than polling it requires some serious preparation.
As for processes: you should not worry about that. It's not about how many processes you use but how heavy they are. 1 badly written process can easily kill your machine while 100 well written will work smoothly. So make sure it is written in such a way that it won't freeze your machine (and I assure you that it can be done up to some point defined by number of simultaneous users).
As for language: it doesn't matter whether this is Node.js or any other language (like Python). Pick the one you are feeling better with. However I am aware that there's a strong tendency to use Node.js for such projects and thus there might be more proper libraries out there in the internets. Or maybe not. Python has for example Twisted and/or Tornado specially for that (and probably much much more).

Websocket is an event-driven protocol, which means you can actually use it for truly real-time communication.
Kenneth Reitz wrote an extension named Flask-Sockets that is excellent for websockets:
Article: introducing-flask-sockets
Github: flask-sockets

In my opinion, the best option for achieving real time data streaming to a frontend UI is to use a messaging service like pubnub. They have libraries for any language you are going to want to be using. Basically, your user interfaces subscribe to a data channel. Things which create data then publish to that channel, and all subscribers receive the publish very quickly. It is also extremely simple to implement.

You can use PubNub and specifically PubNub presence meant especially for online presence detection. It provides key features like
Track online and offline status of users and devices in realtime
Occupancy to monitor user and machine presence in realtime
Join/Leave Notification for immediate updates of all client connections
Global Scale with synchronized servers across the PubNub Data Stream Network
PubNub Presence Tutorial provides code that can be downloaded to get presence up and running in a few minutes. Five Ways You Can Use PubNub Presence shows you the different ways you can use PubNub presence.
You can get started by signing up for PubNub and getting your API keys.

Socket Server in Javascript (in browsers)?

I wanted to be allow users to play p2p in a multiplayer game that I'm developing, but to be able to do that, javascript needs to be able to create a socket server in the browser. Is that even possible? I don't know of any API that let clients connect to other clients in javascript. Is there any other way? Like using a hidden flash element?
I am asking for something that doesn't require a server at all. The packets need to travel from client to client directly

In short no, p2p in a browser is not possible.
The closest you can get is using NodeJS (for potentially p2p JS) or a centralised server (or several servers) and websockets (for sockets in a browser)

This question is old, but I can now give an answer: YES, there is finally a way to do p2p communication between browsers!
Thanks to the new standard WebRTC, modern browsers got support for Data Channels, something much more powerful than WebSockets.
Take a look here:
WebRTC Data Channels
Online Example: Banana Bread 3D is a First Person Shooter game compiled to JS+WebGL, using WebRTC data channels in multiplayer mode:
BananaBread 3D Multiplayer online fps game

Interesting question, but probably a duplicate:
What techniques are available to do P2P in the browser?
i know for sure this can not be done using only javascript(in every browser). According to another answer on Stackoverflow in above topic you might be able do this using rtmfp-api.
This project expose Rtmfp protocol (provided by Flash version 10) to
javascript application throught a hidden flash applet. The protocol
allow multiple clients to communicate directly. See the references for
more details about the protocol.
Looking quickly at the site you still need a rtmfpUrl-server in the middle, which i totally understand because the clients need to be be able to find each other(IPs). But I assume after that it will be p2p. Doing a quick search I also found open-source rtmfp-server(s).
I haven't tried this out myself, but I maybe this will help you achieve your goal.
Some other links:
https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=browser+p2p
https://stackoverflow.com/a/7933140/11926
https://stackoverflow.com/a/5211895/11926
https://stackoverflow.com/a/5023048/11926

While this is a shopping question, i'd look into APE
http://www.ape-project.org/
At the very least you could check out how they've structured it.

In order to implement such a game, your JavaScript client must communicate with the server. The server then runs the game logic, and sends the result back to the client.
JavaScript receives user input and sends it to the server
Server ensures that the input is valid (to prevent cheating) and updates the game with the new input
Server periodically sends the game state to JavaScript (either by long polling or by having JS request it at an interval).
Basically, never trust anything coming from JavaScript as it is extremely easy to modify. Everything should be done server-side.

Here's a solution with mobl (but I haven't tried it yet).
http://zef.me/3391/moving-the-server-to-the-browser

It is possible to go serverless with Flash. This is doable with Adobe Flash's Peer to Peer capabilities. I once wrote a peer to peer chat with it. The drawback is Actionscript is a dying language and may not be supported much in the future.
Here is the raw class.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/net/NetGroup.html
Here is resources if you don't want to write your own.
http://www.as3gamegears.com/category/multiplayer/
If you want a Server option that is light on the server side. Try this node.js extension.
http://socket.io/
I recommend using a java socket server of some sort. Electroserver used to be one of the leaders in the field, it had Unity support and was scalable to hundreds of thousands. Although I think they have fallen on hard times. The Electroserver site has not been accessible for sometime. I know there are others out there but Electroserver is the only one I have used.

How do websites instantly update their content using AJAX?

Today, when I was using Google+ in two separate browsers, I posted something with one browser. The post almost instantly appeared on the second browser (there was maybe 0.5 seconds of delay). How does Google achieve this? Do they constantly send AJax requests to check for new posts? Wouldn't this put a lot of strain on the server?

There are a variety of methods can be used to do this:
Websockets
AJAX Long-Polling
page timers
iframes
Each one has it's own caveats and possibilities.
If you're interested in being able to do a real-time application, you might have a look at socket.io which is a great abstraction library for all of these technologies, so it'll use the one which is best supported in your browser.

Can't say how Google does it exactly for sure, but they would have to be using some sort of push technology. HTML5 WebSockets is something that can do this in newer browsers. In older browsers that don't support websockets, the client usually polls the server periodically. See socket.io for a neat cross-browser implementation of WebSockets, with fallbacks to other methods if the browser doesn't support it, documented here.

I suppose one technique they could use is to send an AJAX request immediately and then block it on the server side until a timeout or content is available to be sent.

For years google was using Comet or Reverse Ajax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming))
However, I believe they are using HTML5 WebSocket now that the API is ready:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket/
http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/

Websocket API to replace REST API? [closed]

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I have an application whose primary function works in real time, through websockets or long polling.
However, most of the site is written in a RESTful fashion, which is nice for application s and other clients in the future. However, I'm thinking about transitioning to a websocket API for all site functions, away from REST. That would make it easier for me to integrate real time features into all parts of the site. Would this make it more difficult to build applications or mobile clients?
I found that some people are already doing stuff like this: SocketStream

Not to say that the other answers here don't have merit, they make some good points. But I'm going to go against the general consensus and agree with you that moving to websockets for more than just realtime features is very appealing.
I am seriously considering moving my app from a RESTful architecture to more of an RPC style via websockets. This is not a "toy app", and I'm not talking about only realtime features, so I do have reservations. But I see many benefits in going this route and feel it could turn out to be an exceptional solution.
My plan is to use DNode, SocketIO, and Backbone. With these tools, my Backbone models and collections can be passed around from/to client and server by simply calling a functions RPC-style. No more managing REST endpoints, serializing/deserializing objects, and so forth. I haven't worked with socketstream yet, but it looks worth checking out.
I still have a long way to go before I can definitively say this is a good solution, and I'm sure it isn't the best solution for every application, but I'm convinced that this combination would be exceptionally powerful. I admit that there are some drawbacks, such as losing the ability to cache resources. But I have a feeling the advantages will outweigh them.
I'd be interested in following your progress exploring this type of solution. If you have any github experiments, please point me at them. I don't have any yet, but hope to soon.
Below is a list of to-read-later links that I've been collecting. I can't vouch that they are all worthwhile, as I've only skimmed many of them. But hopefully some will help.
Great tutorial on using Socket.IO with Express. It exposes express sessions to socket.io and discusses how to have different rooms for each authenticated user.
http://www.danielbaulig.de/socket-ioexpress/
Tutorial on node.js/socket.io/backbone.js/express/connect/jade/redis with authentication, Joyent hosting, etc:
http://fzysqr.com/2011/02/28/nodechat-js-using-node-js-backbone-js-socket-io-and-redis-to-make-a-real-time-chat-app/
http://fzysqr.com/2011/03/27/nodechat-js-continued-authentication-profiles-ponies-and-a-meaner-socket-io/
Tutorial on using Pusher with Backbone.js (using Rails):
http://blog.pusher.com/2011/6/21/backbone-js-now-realtime-with-pusher
Build application with backbone.js on the client and node.js with express, socket.io, dnode on the server.
http://andyet.net/blog/2011/feb/15/re-using-backbonejs-models-on-the-server-with-node/
http://addyosmani.com/blog/building-spas-jquerys-best-friends/
http://fzysqr.com/2011/02/28/nodechat-js-using-node-js-backbone-js-socket-io-and-redis-to-make-a-real-time-chat-app/
http://fzysqr.com/2011/03/27/nodechat-js-continued-authentication-profiles-ponies-and-a-meaner-socket-io/
Using Backbone with DNode:
http://quickleft.com/blog/backbone-without-ajax-part-ii
http://quickleft.com/blog/backbone-without-ajax-part-1
http://sorensen.posterous.com/introducing-backbone-redis
https://github.com/cowboyrushforth/minespotter
http://amir.unoc.net/how-to-share-backbonejs-models-with-nodejs
http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2222935
http://substack.net/posts/24ab8c

HTTP REST and WebSockets are very different. HTTP is stateless, so the web server doesn't need to know anything, and you get caching in the web browser and in proxies. If you use WebSockets, your server is becoming stateful and you need to have a connection to the client on the server.
Request-Reply communication vs Push
Use WebSockets only if you need to PUSH data from the server to the client, that communication pattern is not included in HTTP (only by workarounds). PUSH is helpful if events created by other clients needs to be available to other connected clients e.g. in games where users should act on other clients behaviour. Or if your website is monitoring something, where the server pushes data to the client all the time e.g. stock markets (live).
If you don't need to PUSH data from the server, it's usually easier to use a stateless HTTP REST server. HTTP uses a simple Request-Reply communication pattern.

I'm thinking about transitioning to a WebSocket api for all site functions
No. You should not do it. There is no harm if you support both models. Use REST for one way communication/simple requests & WebSocket for two way communication especially when server want to send real time notification.
WebSocket is a more efficient protocol than RESTful HTTP but still RESTful HTTP scores over WebSocket in below areas.
Create/Update/Delete resources have been defined well for HTTP. You have to implement these operations at low level for WebSockets.
WebSocket connections scale vertically on a single server where as HTTP connections scale horizontally. There are some proprietary non standards-based solutions for WebSocket horizontal scaling .
HTTP comes with a lot of good features such as caching, routing, multiplexing, gzipping etc. These have to built on top of Websocket if you chose Websocket.
Search engine optimizations works well for HTTP URLs.
All Proxy, DNS, firewalls are not yet fully aware of WebSocket traffic. They allow port 80 but might restrict traffic by snooping on it first.
Security with WebSocket is all-or-nothing approach.
Have a look at this article for more details.

The only problem I can using TCP (WebSockets) as your main web content delivery strategy is that there is very little reading material out there about how to design your website architecture and infrastructure using TCP.
So you can't learn from other people's mistakes and development is going to be slower. It's also not a "tried and tested" strategy.
Of course your also going to lose all the advantages of HTTP (Being stateless, and caching are the bigger advantages).
Remember that HTTP is an abstraction for TCP designed for serving web content.
And let's not forget that SEO and search engines don't do websockets. So you can forget about SEO.
Personally I would recommend against this as there's too much risk.
Don't use WS for serving websites, use it for serving web applications
However if you have a toy or a personal websites by all means go for it. Try it, be cutting-edge. For a business or company you cannot justify the risk of doing this.

I learned a little lesson (the hard way). I made a number crunching application that runs on Ubuntu AWS EC2 cloud services (uses powerful GPUs), and I wanted to make a front-end for it just to watch its progress in realtime. Due to the fact that it needed realtime data, it was obvious that I needed websockets to push the updates.
It started with a proof of concept, and worked great. But then when we wanted to make it available to the public, we had to add user session, so we needed login features. And no matter how you look at it, the websocket has to know which user it deals with, so we took the shortcut of using the websockets to authenticate the users. It seemed obvious, and it was convenient.
We actually had to spend quiet some time to make the connections reliable. We started out with some cheap websocket tutorials, but discovered that our implementation was not able to automatically reconnect when the connection was broken. That all improved when we switched to socket-io. Socket-io is a must !
Having said all that, to be honest, I think we missed out on some great socket-io features. Socket-io has a lot more to offer, and I am sure, if you take it in account in your initial design, you can get more out of it. In contrast, we just replaced the old websockets with the websocket functionality of socket-io, and that was it. (no rooms, no channels, ...) A redesign could have made everything more powerful. But we didn't have time for that. That's something to remember for our next project.
Next we started to store more and more data (user history, invoices, transactions, ...). We stored all of it in an AWS dynamodb database, and AGAIN, we used socket-io to communicate the CRUD operations from the front-end to the backend. I think we took a wrong turn there. It was a mistake.
Because shortly after we found out that Amazon's cloud services (AWS) offer some great load-balancing/scaling tools for RESTful applications.
We have the impression now that we need to write a lot of code to perform the handshakes of the CRUD operations.
Recently we implemented Paypal integration. We managed to get it to work. But again, all tutorials are doing it with RESTful APIs. We had to rewrite/rethink their examples to implement them with websockets. We got it to work fairly fast though. But it does feel like we are going against the flow.
Having said all that, we are going live next week. We got there in time, everything works. And it's fast, but will it scale ?

I would consider using both. Each technology has their merit and there is no one-size fits all solution.
The separation of work goes this way:
WebSockets would be the primary method of an application to communicate with the server where a session is required. This eliminates many hacks that are needed for the older browsers (the problem is support for the older browsers which will eliminate this)
RESTful API is used for GET calls that are not session oriented (i.e. not authentication needed) that benefit from browser caching. A good example of this would be reference data for drop downs used by a web application. However. can change a bit more often than...
HTML and Javascript. These comprise the UI of the webapp. These would generally benefit being placed on a CDN.
Web Services using WSDL are still the best way of enterprise level and cross-enterprise communication as it provides a well defined standard for message and data passing. Primarily you'd offload this to a Datapower device to proxy to your web service handler.
All of this happen on the HTTP protocol which gives use secure sockets via SSL already.
For the mobile application though, websockets cannot reconnect back to a disconnected session (How to reconnect to websocket after close connection) and managing that isn't trivial. So for mobile apps, I would still recommend REST API and polling.
Another thing to watch out for when using WebSockets vs REST is scalability. WebSocket sessions are still managed by the server. RESTful API when done properly are stateless (which mean there is no server state that needs to be managed), thus scalability can grow horizontally (which is cheaper) than vertically.

Do I want updates from the server?
Yes: Socket.io
No: REST
The downsides to Socket.io are:
Scalability: WebSockets require open connections and a much different Ops setup to web scale.
Learnin: I don't have unlimited time for my learnin. Things have to get done!
I'll still use Socket.io in my project, but not for basic web forms that REST will do nicely.

WebSockets (or long polling) based transports mostly serve for (near) real-time communication between the server and client. Although there are numerous scenarios where these kinds of transports are required, such as chat or some kind of real-time feeds or other stuff, not all parts of some web application need to be necessarily connected bidirectionally with the server.
REST is resource based architecture which is well understood and offers it's own benefits over other architectures. WebSockets incline more to streams/feeds of data in real-time which would require you to create some kind of server based logic in order to prioritize or differentiate between resources and feeds (in case you don't want to use REST).
I assume that eventually there would be more WebSockets centric frameworks like socketstream in the future when this transport would be more widespread and better understood/documented in the form of data type/form agnostic delivery. However, I think, this doesn't mean that it would/should replace the REST just because it offers functionality which isn't necessarily required in numerous use cases and scenarios.

I'd like to point out this blog post that is up to me, the best answer to this question.
In short, YES
The post contains all the best practices for such kind of API.

That's not a good idea. The standard isn't even finalized yet, support varies across browsers, etc. If you want to do this now you'll end up needing to fallback to flash or long polling, etc. In the future it probably still won't make a lot of sense, since the server has to support leaving connections open to every single user. Most web servers are designed instead to excel at quickly responding to requests and closing them as quickly as possibly. Heck even your operating system would have to be tuned to deal with a high number of simultaneous connections (each connection using up more ephemeral ports and memory). Stick to using REST for as much of the site as you can.

Web Sockets questions

I have a couple of questions concerning Web Sockets.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightlies support Web Sockets. So does Webkit (Chrome 4 + Safari 4/5). Internet Explorer 9 is supposed to feature Web Sockets at some point according to Microsoft (before the stable release).
Anyway, my questions are:
I am building a JavaScript admin interface to manage a website. Should I use Web Sockets for the client-server communication instead of XMLHttpRequest if I told you that I do not need to care about browser compatibility?
Would Web Sockets result in faster save, deletion and update calls compared to the usual situation with XMLHttpRequest? Would the requests be more instant?
I am aware of the HTML5's navigator.online and window.addEventListener('offline', ...), but with Web Sockets (upon connection loss), am I able to detect connection issues more accurately and faster? I mean, when I turn off my Internet connection, or block it with my firewall, Firefox still seems to state that navigator.online is true. With Web Sockets, it seems, the connection to the server will be lost instantly, thus, I can detect connection problems more accurately?
Can I support Web Sockets server-side with pure PHP, so, that the code is portable with other web servers (no need to install any Apache modules or do other customization). I would like to distribute the software to a couple of places without having to ask people to install all sorts of modules to their HTTPD or so.
I wish you can answer to as many of those questions as possible. I am really interested in answers.

I am building a JavaScript admin interface to manage a website. Should I use Web Sockets for the client-server communication instead of XMLHttpRequest if I told you that I do not need to care about browser compatibility?
It appears to me that you want to use WebSockets just for the sake of it. The main reason to use WebSockets is when you want to push data from the server to the client. If your application does not need this, you should probably not use WebSockets.
Would Web Sockets result in faster save, deletion and update calls compared to the usual situation with XMLHttpRequest? Would the requests be more instant?
You could probably save some time on both ends (client and server) due to the absence of headers. But the gain is probably pretty small.
with Web Sockets (upon connection loss), am I able to detect connection issues more accurately and faster?
Yes, an event will fire instantly when the WebSocket closes. Alternatives would be long-polling or periodic XHRs. Or event client-side storage.
Can I support Web Sockets server-side with pure PHP, so, that the code is portable with other web servers
First I suggest you read through this. WebSockets don't work very well in a synchronous way. PHP and apache don't work very well in an asynchronous way. Although there are some implementations, many of them are outdated. I personally would use an other language for this, such as ruby, python, java or server-side javascript. Simply because the languages have better support for the asynchronous model and the WebSocket implementations are more sophisticated.
The WebSocket protocol is currently still a draft, it can change. Just like it did a few weeks ago. So your code may very well break.
My advice is: Do not use WebSockets just for the sake of it. If you have a real-time event-driven application, then it is probably the right choice. Make sure you understand what WebSockets are for and what it takes on the server side, also in terms of event-driven applications. Don't use it for anything production, it's way too fragile.