Orbital was built as an in-house demo for DISQUS to show a realtime representation of comments as they happen on the network. It was heavily inspired by Mozilla's Glow project, but was mostly rewritten in order to achieve true real-time. It was originally released to the public at PyCon 2012.
It's a simple demonstration of how easy you can achieve something like this with just a little bit of Python and JavaScript code in modern browsers.
The code itself does not contain the firehose-like mechanism DISQUS uses to obtain the data from their API. It does, however, contain a script which allows you to send mock data to demonstrate how to create a publisher.
You can view the current version of orbital on the web at http://map.labs.disqus.com
You can install most requirements via Homebrew and PIP
brew install geoip libevent zeromq pip install -r requirements.txt
Install Maxmind's GeoIP city data files to /usr/share/GeoIP/
cp GeoIPCity.dat /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat
Run the server
python server.py
In another process, send sample data using feeder.py
python feeder.py
Configure haproxy (or something) to forward websockets on port 80 to port 7000, and setup something to serve site/.
Map design and original concept from Mozilla's Glow project.