The big question is if Heroku will suddenly support a fairly large number of long-lived connections to a Node.js hosted app, and how pricing would work. Developing real-time apps and custom servers are how Node.js really shines. A WebSockets module took only a few hours to develop for instance.
I'm curious about the "fanout" name which immediately made me think of a message broker like RabbitMQ on the backend somewhere. I guess "fanout" here means 1 client to fanout.js to N >> 1 other clients.
There are a number of similar projects popping up like this one as of late for Node.js. NodeRed, fanout, dealer, etc.
That's great. Node.js makes previously "complex" things a little easier to setup and play with.
As someone who witnessed the events of 9/11 in NY from across the river in Hoboken, NJ this was fairly terrifying too. I was not expecting to have that association when I clicked the link!
Somewhere Jodie Foster just threw off her headphones, jumped off the hood of her car, and frantically went to investigate. She won't find much. (hint: 3-D, not 2-D).
The big problem with this is that it's just one server. I'm working on something called "NodeRed" (har har) that lets one scale out the frontend using Redis for communication. It's generic enough to do PUBSUB, chat, games, etc.
http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertex.js/blob/master/lib/Ver...
http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertex.js/tree/master/lib/Ver...
http://github.com/edvakf/node-tokyocabinet
http://nodejs.org/api.html#addons-289