March 1, 2011 — Voxer is a walkie-talkie for the modern age, an iPhone app that lets you instantly talk across the interwebs and listen at the same time and leave voice messages if no one is on the other end and simultaneously chat with multiple people and toggle between text and voice to your heart’s content. It’s a real-time internet app in the extreme, and that’s why it’s built with a development platform most of the world has never heard of.
Matt Ranney and his team originally conceived Voxer [1] as a two-way VoIP radio for the military, and he started coding in good old fashioned C++. “That’s what you use for a serious, high-performance military application,” he says. But C++ proved too complex and too rigid for the project at hand, so he switched to Python, a higher-level language that famously drives services at the likes of Google, Yahoo!, and NASA. But Python proved too slow for a low-latency VoIP app, so he switched to Node. Read More
