Ably was proud to celebrate our 8th birthday this year, and we’ve enjoyed reflecting on some of our achievements since launching in 2016. When we launched, we believed that realtime interactions would underpin our everyday digital experiences, rather than just augment them. And so we set out on a mission to build the definitive realtime experience platform.

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!

Not long ago, I was handed a problem that’s no stranger to the world of programming: making asynchronous threads communicate effectively within the same process. Given the widespread nature of this issue, I expected to find an existing solution to resolve it. My search led me to the concept of message queue, which seemed promising for streamlining this communication challenge.

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.