Twitter popularized the term "firehose API", to mean a realtime stream of data sent through a persistent connection. But even if you're not a realtime service, streaming APIs are great for pushing data from the backend to clients. They reduce resource usage because the server can decide when it's a good time to send a incremental chunk of data. They can also improve the responsiveness of your user experience. The same HTTP API can be reused to power multiple different apps. For example, you could write your web frontend with a Javascript frameworks like Backbone.js, but reuse the same API to power a native iOS application. Follow the jump to read about how streaming APIs work, and how you can write one with Rack::Stream.

They say you can tell a lot about a person just from their bookshelf. Here is an inside look at our design team's current reading lists!

We're back with a debriefing on all the interesting stuff that happened at Saturday's exclusive Day of Foster.ly event.

Jurgen and Anthony poke fun of the stylus tool and talk about fostering happy development teams in this exclusive interview at MoDevUX.

Recently I was working on a project and wanted to be able to utilize Tidy to clean up some HTML output. I added the tidy_ffi gem to my project and voila, it worked! Or, to be more specific, it worked locally. Once I pushed to Heroku I started running into trouble, namely that libtidy.so, the dynamically linkable native library that tidy_ffi depends upon, wasn't found. Uh oh.

Have a great idea? Do you daydream about founding a startup? Do you have the entrepreneurial spirit but don't know how to kickstart your vision?

Then join us on May 12th at the Artisphere in Arlington, Va for "A Day of Foster.ly" - an engaging event led by DC, Maryland and Virginia entrepreneurs, designed to empower startups, visionaries, innovative students and other aspiring entrepreneurs like yourself with the resources and information needed to get started and to succeed.