Short Version: Hookbox is a message queue built specifically for browser clients. Whenever a client connects, subscribes, publishes, etc. Hookbox makes a Webhook request (HTTP callback) to obtain permission for the action from the web application (PHP, Django, etc.) All server-side app logic therefore remains within the web framework/language.

Very cool stuff, hopefully.

To quote the beginning of the "What about my web app?" section

  This ten step tutorial shows how a client can interact with Hookbox. 
  Adding web app integration is also trivial.

I can tell you, combining a real-time component with your existing web app framework is not trivial; hopefully Hookbox might change this. In general, a framework that eases this pain is very needed.

I experimented with these ideas with my project "Hotdot" (http://github.com/clemesha/hotdot), which is mostly a "big example", not a framework or whatever.

Hotdot uses Orbited (which was originally authored by Michael Carter, and who is also the author of Hookbox). Michael did contact me with the Hookbox project a while back, and it looks as though he has made significant progress on the project since.

Saw a demo of this at the last jquery meetup, very cool stuff, and the guy demoing it actually coded a live chat app from scratch so everyone could see how its done. The fact that they also have a hosted solution for people to try hacking against gives them a big a+ in my book. Great job.

Right now I'm getting the error "Error establishing database connection" are they being overloaded?

This is very cool. I'd like to see it hooked into a web app though.