As web applications continue to become more interactive and sophisticated, real-time messaging and updates are becoming increasingly prevalent. Performance optimizations and constraints for real-time web and mobile web applications are crucial to successful application deployment. One of the hottest new APIs in HTML5 is WebSocket, which enables true duplex communication without the overhead, complexity, and extraneous latency of HTTP-based solutions. Although WebSocket is an exciting new API, we can easily fallback to HTTP-based techniques when WebSocket is not available with Dojo's Socket API. Finally we'll review the future of real-time applications, including bi-directional audio and video streaming.