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.

NodeJS is a JavaScript runtime environment for running JavaScript applications outside the browser environment. It’s asynchronous and event-driven, meaning it doesn't block the event loop - making NodeJS highly suitable for the development of server-side web applications. With around 50,000 open source packages available through npm (Node Package Manager), NodeJS facilitates the seamless backend extension. The GitHub repository has 99k stars and 27.5k forks demonstrating an active community.

We are excited to announce that the Ably Spaces SDK now includes support for React Hooks. This means that developers can integrate collaborative features into their React-based applications in an efficient and idiomatic way. To help you quickly get started we have created a set of React-based starter kits for the four key collaborative features supported within the Spaces SDK - jump to these now!

Component libraries are essential tools for efficient React development. They provide a collection of pre-built UI components that can be reused across projects, saving developers time and effort. In this article, we'll explore some of the best React component libraries that can boost your productivity and enhance your user interface. Whether you need a simple button, a complex dashboard, or anything in between, you will find a suitable component library for your React project.

SaaS APIs typically require some kind of authentication to allow access. While there are many ways that APIs can implement authentication, one popular choice is using secret keys as the scheme. Exposing secret keys directly to a client application however can create security risks, so how can client applications based on libraries like React securely access SaaS services? Many APIs, including Ably, offer an additional client-oriented token authentication system.

Ensuring accessibility to all types of media is incredibly important, both for enabling as many people as possible to enjoy the media, as well as supporting as many ways as possible for interacting with it. Closed Captioning helps massively with ensuring video content is more accessible by providing a transcription of its audio.

Miro and Figma have triggered the imagination of many developers looking to build similar collaborative features into their applications. It’s a fast developing landscape with new entrants and innovations emerging all the time across product categories - CMS to slide decks, spreadsheets to project management.

On this page you’ll learn more than you ever thought you needed to know about WebSockets with React, including how to build a smooth realtime cursor experience from scratch. We’ll jump into the tutorial, which uses React on the front and Node on the back soon but, first, let’s start with some general guidance when it comes to WebSockets with React.