I give a basic introduction to WebSockets and share some of my experiences from using Django-Channels for pushing data from external sources to the user in near real-time on a production scale. Rather than following the often-discussed example of a chatroom, I show how WebSockets can be used for handling backend events that origin at the models, querysets or even management commands level.

Attendees should be able to implement WebSockets using Django-Channels in their new and existing projects even if they had no previous experience with the technology. Their understanding of the applicable use-cases should be significantly wider than if they only followed Django-Channel's documentation or tutorial

The talk will start with a discussion of the standard request-response cycle in web application and show its current limitations in order to present how the WebSockets specification attempts to solve the problems. First, a brief history and current state of the WS spec is presented. Second, the choice of Django-Channels as a library to implement WS in a Django projects is defended. Third, I show how the newly introduced concepts of Consumers, Channels, and Messages correspond to Django's Views, Request, and Responses. Finally, I walk the audience through a simple but working example putting all the presented concepts into practice. Finally, I want to point the audience to some common problems that we have encountered while running commercial, production-scale systems and share our solutions to them.