An event indicates a state change: that something has happened. This ‘something’ could be a hardware sensor reading that passes a threshold, or a software event from game logic, or user input such as a keystroke or mouse click. Events are used to signal to interested parties that a state change occurred.

As the post-pandemic world emerges, the future of events such as summits, conferences or concerts is brighter than ever. Thanks to hybrid events, in-person events are now doubled by online happenings, which allows event organizers to reach much larger, geographically distributed audiences. For organizers and ticket distributors, providing a great ticket-booking experience to their global audiences has become more important than ever.

We are excited to announce our new Kafka connector. The Ably Kafka Connector provides a ready-made integration between Kafka and Ably, helping companies distribute data from Kafka to internet-connected client devices in a fast, easy, dependable and secure way. As part of our partnership with Confluent, the connector is available on the Confluent Hub as a Gold standard connector.

Hello again! Welcome to Part 2 of this article series where we go through database-driven architectures by understanding the nitty gritties of a chat app where you can edit messages. Here's the Part 1 of this article series, if you missed it: Database-driven realtime architectures: building a serverless and editable chat app - Part 1 Check out the editable chat app or explore the project on GitHub.

Database-driven realtime architectures are becoming more and more common as evidenced by key backers and widespread use of software like Firebase and Supabase. The two key priorities for an app following database-driven realtime messaging are long-term storage and change data capture (CDC) updates from the database. In this two part article series, we’ll take a detailed look at a fully serverless chat app where you can edit previously published messages.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we walked through how to bypass Ably’s SDKs and connect to Ably’s backend using websocat, where every JSON message has to be typed out by hand. In this second part, we’ll fix that tedious bit by switching to NodeJS, and we’ll continue our process of building our own minimal Ably (NodeJS) SDK.

Built by our long-time community expert Apoorv Vardhan, the Ably-Postgres connector can listen to changes in a Postgres table and publish realtime messages on Ably channels whenever a change occurs. The connector enables building database-driven realtime applications where long-term storage and update triggers from previously published messages are essential. One such example is an editable chat app, which we’ll talk about later in this article.

Ably is an enterprise-grade pub/sub messaging platform with a suite of integrated services to deliver realtime experiences like interactive learning, logistics GPS tracking, and live sports updates.

The global increase of realtime data is spurred on by the steady rise of user demand for realtime digital experiences - from virtual events, news, and financial information to IoT devices. The Ably platform has been providing realtime infrastructure for over 5 years now , and we’ve seen, and helped, the demand increase first-hand. A few years ago, our customers only had realtime requirements for one or two specific features, usually around firing updates and notifications.

Presenting the Ably Periodic Table of Realtime putting in a single place all the disparate, well, elements of the realtime and event-driven space. Users increasingly demand realtime, synchronous digital experiences. This demand is growing exponentially and presents serious engineering challenges. Event-driven architectures meet the challenge head-on, filling the requirements gap, and establishing themselves as an indispensable, integral part of the solution.