Hi, my name is Charles Ying.
I'm one of the cofounders of PixVerse.
PixVerse is a next-generation virtual world company.
We were recently acquired by hi5 Networks,
the fastest-growing social network.
Today, I'm gonna be talking about PixChat,
our real-time chat room that we built using Google App Engine.
So let's get started.
So this is PixChat here, running on my hi5 homepage.
This is running in the open social platform.
So to give you a brief overview of PixChat...
PixChat seems a little confusing at first,
but basically what you have here on the left
are people viewing the PixChat from anywhere on the Web.
So either on a profile page or on any Web page
you've embedded this chat room on.
On the right-hand side you can see people
who are active-- actively chatting.
And mixed in as well are notes, stickers,
and photos people have left onscreen
for other people to see.
So what I'll show here is--
this is a chat going on.
As people enter and leave, they'll sometimes chat.
I can even type in a message,
like, "hello?"
It'll show up here.
I can even move my avatar around,
so it comes up here.
So people can see me better.
I can even check out people's profiles
if I want, or I can chat with them privately
as well.
I can also embed this chat room on any Web page
I want just by copying the embed code here.
I can now also add things like--
I can change the backgrounds, I can change this to a...
brown background.
And here you can see the background has changed
instantly in real time.
I can add stickers.
So I can put some sushi,
maybe a spinning wheel,
a teddy bear,
and a cookie, and they all appear on here.
So here's one of the teddy bears.
You can move around and put him here.
I can write notes to people.
I can also add photos.
I'm gonna add a photo.
Let's see. That one.
And this one.
And they appear instantly here.
So here's one of the photos.
And I can just zoom in.
And it'll zoom in on it.
You can see the whole photo here.
If there are other photos people have put online,
you can see them as well.
It's basically photo-sharing.
I can also search for videos.
So here's a search for App Engine.
So I'm gonna pull out the campfire video
and stick it on the page.
And that showed up here.
And I can play it.
And it plays it straight from YouTube.
(man on video) Hi, everyone.
(Charles) Right here from YouTube.
And I'll just close that.
And that's pretty much a tour of PixChat.
Just to show what happens when you put it across the Web.
You can take the embed code and put it anywhere,
but PixChat also appears on your profile.
So here's a profile page with a smaller version
of the chat window running here.
So you basically have a chat room
that can be embedded anywhere instantly.
And I can even copy and paste that
and put that on any Web page,
just like we've done on our main homepage
here as well.
The way we built PixChat on App Engine was,
we ported WebPI, which was only a few lines of code
and didn't take very long to run
on top of App Engine's Python framework.
Um, it was really easy.
And we were able to start serving
our open social gadgets, our Flash animations,
and our Flash clients all from App Engine.
And the real-time aspect of the system
is using our real-time servers,
but everything else runs on App Engine.
In terms of the-- the--
the user's last-visited location
and the presence information, we store those
using the Datastore API and the memcache API.
And we use keys to speed up the queries.
And we use memcache to-- it's really very easy.
Just a few lines of code added in
to make things work great.
And the whole porting effort for our prototype took
only three hours to put together.
And we had the whole system up and running.