"Realtime" is unfortunately an overloaded term, as even the Wikipedia article shows.
Realtime in the context of the web applications is closest to what is considered a "soft" realtime application. Wikipedia defines this as: The usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.
In the context of the web, it refers to some type of data (text, voice or video) broadcasting/synchronization. Chatrooms and multiplayer gaming are some examples of this type of software.
A lot of people include newsfeeds and notifications in this definition but those can be delayed arbitrarily without much degradation of QoS.
I'm one of the organizers, but yeah, we're a small dev shop in Eastern Washington who just love doing realtime stuff so we figured we'd try to throw a conference about it.
Didn't really realize how much interest there would be. Personally, I'm pretty pumped to hear about some of the new realtime frameworks. NullMQ, SocketStream, Derby, et. al.
Looking forward to adding some of those tools to the 'ol toolbelt.
If you're doing anything with the real-time web (websockets, node, twisted, etc), you need to be there. If you look through the speaker list, you'll see there's almost no fluff, just lots of experienced implementors. I think the same will be true of the attendees.
To be clear, I'm not affiliated in anyway, just excited about attending.
Thanks, Ben! We're thrilled about it, too! (One of the organizers here)
The idea for the conference came out of discussions that @henrikjoreteg, @fritzy, and I had in Brussels in February early this year at the XSF Summit. Our team at &yet has been building realtime web + mobile apps for the last couple years. both for clients and for our own products. We've used a variety of different methods building them and made friends in several realtime-y communities, particularly XMPP and Node.js. There's so much new stuff going on in this field all the time, we wished that we could get people together from all the different communities working in this niche.
We're really grateful for being able to team up with Julien Genestoux of Superfeedr, who's the quintessential Hacker+Hustler CEO+CTO. We've also gotten tons of help and support from Chris Williams of jsconf and all kinds of other folks. We couldn't be more excited with how things have shaped up for krtconf so far after 8 months of ridiculously hard work! :)
(I expected something closer to what is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing - RTOS and similar topics.)