We’re excited to announce that Ably LiveSync is now in public alpha! LiveSync is a state synchronisation product that allows you to watch changes to your database and publish them reliably to millions of frontend clients, enabling those clients to stay up to date with the latest changes in realtime.

Ably’s LiveSync product is now available as a public alpha release. LiveSync allows you to automatically keep data in sync across servers and clients, in realtime. This is a hard distributed systems problem. In this post, we’re going to have a look at four existing solutions to realtime data synchronization, the different technical designs, and the tradeoffs they make.

The Ably service handles massive amounts of data throughput and concurrent connections for many customers while maintaining a highly reliable and available service, with a 5x9s uptime guarantee. Ably has no scale ceiling, and that’s challenging work (it’s one of the reasons I joined Ably). While the challenges we face in delivering our service are compelling, we sometimes face novel internet scale problems, such as breaching the limits of AWS services!

This is the last in a series of posts on adding an in-game chat room with React. In the first, we added a chat room to a game of tic-tac-toe. In the second, we used Presence to add a typing indicator. And in the third we used Presence to show whether or not an opponent has left the game. Now, let's look at how to add the last feature - reaction emojis on our opponent's messages.

This is the third in a series of posts on adding an in-game chat room with React. In the first post, we added a chat room to a game of tic-tac-toe. In the second, we used Presence to add typing indicators that show us when the other person in the chat is typing. With all of that in place, this post will build on our chat app even further.

Live chats have revolutionized customer support, offering seamless and instant communication between businesses and their customers. When building a live chat, there are two main components on the client side: a chat button and a chat window. The chat button is a clickable icon on your website to prompt visitors to start a conversation. The chat window is the interface where the actual conversation occurs.

With collaboration tools out there always pushing the frontier of responsive design in applications, such as Miro in the design space, it’s important to ensure that your own applications are providing the functionality developers are now expecting. A fairly typical tool used by all, be it employees of a business attempting to organize a schedule, or individuals organizing their own social lives, are schedulers.

As we kick off 2024, it’s time to look ahead. And while yes, it brings the Paris Olympics, the release of highly anticipated VR devices, and a potential new Nintendo console – that’s not all. It also marks React’s second decade and another year of innovation for the popular framework! But what does 2024 hold for React? And what are developers excited about? We spoke to our network and scoured communities to find out – here’s what they said.

If you’re looking to build an app with realtime data APIs but don’t know which data source to use, you may find yourself struggling to get started due to the sheer amount of options available to you. In this blog, we’ll dig into some of our favorite free examples to choose from (it’s worth a quick note to remind you to check their usage license and free tier allowance). Below are data sources split into transport, weather, and currency sources.

In a previous article, I took you through how to add a chat room to a simple game of tic-tac-toe. This post is the second in the series, in which we will look at how to build out the functionality of that chat room with additional features. Across the series, we’ll look at how to manage presence and how to enable emoji reactions – in this post, the focus is on typing indicators. Follow on to find out how to display an indicator when the other person is typing.