It's been one year since Action Cable debuted at RailsConf 2015, and Sophie DeBenedetto is here to answer the question in the minds of many developers: what is it really like to implement "the highlight of Rails 5"? Sophie is a web developer and an instructor at the Flatiron School. Her first love is Ruby on Rails, although she has developed projects with and written about Rails, Ember and Phoenix.

Recent years have seen the rise of "the real-time web." Web apps we use every day rely on real-time features—the sort of features that let you see new posts magically appearing at the top of your feeds without having to lift a finger.

While we may take those features...

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

Django Channels allows Python developers to build real-time, asynchronous web apps with Python and JavaScript. It augments Django’s robust response-request architecture with asynchronous protocol handling, including WebSockets support. In this Django Channels tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a real-time chat app with Django, Channels, Redis, and Heroku Dynos.

What are Django Channels?

When Django was created, almost 20 years ago, the web was a...