Real Time Glossary

Browse 16 real time terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

16 Real Time Terms

Convex
A reactive backend platform that combines a real-time database, serverless functions, and file storage into a single TypeScript-native service. Convex...
Game Loop
The central loop in a game engine that continuously processes input, updates game state, and renders frames. Typically runs 30-60+ times per second, with...
GraphQL Subscription
A GraphQL operation type for real-time data — clients subscribe to events and receive updates when the underlying data changes, typically over WebSocket. Like...
Interrupt Handler
A callback function registered with the kernel that executes immediately when a hardware or software interrupt fires, preempting the currently running code to...
Long Polling
A technique where the client sends an HTTP request and the server holds it open until new data is available (or a timeout expires), then responds. The client...
Operational Transform
An algorithm for maintaining consistency in collaborative editing by transforming concurrent operations against each other. When two users type at the same...
Phoenix Framework
A web framework written in Elixir that runs on the Erlang BEAM VM, known for extremely high concurrency, fault tolerance, and real-time features via Channels...
Phoenix LiveView
A Phoenix library that enables rich, interactive UIs by rendering HTML on the server and pushing diff updates to the browser over a WebSocket — eliminating the...
Redis Pub/Sub
A fire-and-forget messaging system built into Redis where publishers send messages to named channels and all currently connected subscribers receive them in...
server-sent events
A simple, one-directional protocol where the server pushes updates to the browser over a persistent HTTP connection using a text-based event stream. Simpler...
Server-Sent Events
A simple HTTP-based protocol for one-way server-to-client streaming. The server sends text events over a long-lived HTTP connection using the text/event-stream...
Short Polling
A client-side technique where the browser or application repeatedly sends HTTP requests to the server at fixed intervals (e.g., every 2 seconds) to check for...
Streaming
A data processing model in which data is produced, transmitted, and consumed incrementally as a continuous flow rather than as a single batch. In web APIs,...
Stream Processing
Processing data continuously as it arrives rather than in periodic batches. Handles unbounded datasets using windowing (tumbling, sliding, session) for...
WebRTC
Web Real-Time Communication — a set of browser APIs and protocols enabling peer-to-peer audio, video, and data streaming directly between browsers without...
WebSocket
WebSocket is a communication protocol that provides full-duplex, bidirectional communication between a web browser and a server over a single, persistent TCP...

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