Real-time notifications on Django using gevent-socketio and RabbitMQ

This time we’ll be replacing Node.js with a 100% Python implementation using gevent-socketio and Redis with RabbitMQ, but we also didn’t want to bore you with the same vanilla notifications site, so we’re going to build something different. Something useful.

This time we’re going to build a complete GeoDjango-based site to report geo-located incidents in real-time using Google Maps.

The Application

The application is a Django 1.7 site that uses GeoDjango (backed by PostGIS) to track and report in real-time geo-located incidents that occur in certain areas of interest around the world. It provides views to manage incidents and areas of interest, a view to monitor the occurrence of incidents in real-time and a view to report incidents that uses geolocator to detect the user’s location.

Whenever an incident is saved (or updated), a message is sent to a RabbitMQ broadcast queue. At this time, the system checks whether the incident occurred in an area of interest, and a special alert message is sent if necessary. Any subscriber to the queue (which are created when a client connects to the notifications socket.io namespace) will receive the message and send a packet down the socket’s channel. It is up the the client’s JavaScript code to update the maps and generate notifications and alerts if necessary.

Although simple, the site has all the basic functionality and can be used as a basis for similar projects. The source is available on GitHub.

Original and full blog post: www.machinalis.com/blog/rt-notifications-gevent-gis/