One of the most common UI elements in software is the tried and true data grid. The idea of organizing data into rows and columns dates back thousands of years. Though human creativity has given us many more ways of displaying data, the humble grid remains a powerful tool in the software developers toolbelt. Today, however, working with any data, including data in grids, often benefits from collaboration capabilities that allow multiple users to work together on the same data.

When WebSockets were first announced in 2011, they had some teething problems. As a result of these teething problems, only the most daring and experimental developers would rely solely on WebSockets for realtime communication. For most of us, it became a necessity to implement a fallback protocol in case the WebSocket connection can’t be established.

The State of Developer Ecosystem 2022 report revealed that 65% of developers are using JavaScript, making it the most popular language. JavaScript also claims the spot of most popular primary language with 34%. Of all the JavaScript developers 80% use at least one JavaScript framework. Though there are thousands of JavaScript frameworks available, only a small subset of them is being used by developers.

Imagine having to restart WhatsApp whenever you anticipate a new message, or needing to reload the page every time you expect an update on the big game. That would be a terrible user experience! Today, users expect the UI to automatically update the moment information becomes available from the backend, so, of course, we must enable them in our applications. There are a handful of technologies, techniques, and services you can use to implement live updates in React.

Authenticating WebSocket connections from the browser is a lot trickier than it should be. Cookie authentication isn’t suitable for every app, and the WebSocket browser API makes it impossible to set an Authorization header with a token. It’s actually all a bit of a mess! That is the last thing you want to hear when it comes to security, so I’ve done the research to present this tidy list of methods to send credentials from the browser.

NodeJS is a JavaScript-based backend framework for web applications. It enables fast, scalable, and efficient development with high concurrency and data streams. Choosing the right database for NodeJS applications is a challenge for developers. A database should store and manage the data, handle the volume and velocity of data, provide the features and functionality you need, and be compatible, easy, secure, and reliable with NodeJS.

One of the most fun parts of playing games with other people is talking to your opponent: "Have a good game!" "Hmm... interesting move..." "Your children's CHILDREN will rue this day!" Online games are no exception: they're a lot more fun if you can say hello to your opponent, or even debate some strategy.

When building web applications you’ll often be using services on the client that require authentication. A common way client-side SDKs like Ably authenticate themselves is by using server-side API endpoints that generate and return access tokens. Using access tokens allows you to keep your service’s secrets on the server and instead issue time-limited and scope-limited tokens to a client. Some services even let you create revocable tokens for added security.

Realtime data is rapidly becoming a standard in many consumer applications. From responsive chat applications to low latency financial applications, nobody wants to refresh their browser for new data. With lots of data bouncing around Kafka behind a firewall, it begs the question of how you can serve this information to your users without sacrificing on latency. Ably provides a seamless way to serve this data to your end users devices, globally, through a direct integration with Confluent Cloud.

Websites and apps are slowly starting to integrate more collaborative features as a means of increasing interactivity and the functionality of various use-cases. Be it a collaborative document or a chat room, one common feature is to show who else is in the space with you. Typically this’ll be done with an Avatar Stack, a collection of icons, each representing a client connected to the space.