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Ably

Introducing Ably LiveSync: Seamlessly sync database changes with frontend clients

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.

Reliably syncing database and frontend state: A realtime competitor analysis

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.

Overcoming scale challenges with AWS & CloudFront - 5 key takeaways

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!

How to enable reaction emojis for in-game chat with React

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.

The no-nonsense guide React Server Components

React Server Components (RSCs) seem to be everywhere lately, but what problem do they really solve? In this video, Alex Booker from Ably (@CodeCast) explores RSCs from scratch, revealing the motivation and benefits behind them. You might be surprised to learn - they're not merely a React feature, but a fundamentally new model for building full-stack React applications with meta frameworks like Next 13.4 by Vercel.

Using Presence in in-game chat: Is the other person still there?

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.

How to build a live chat widget in React

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.

Creating shared live schedules using Bryntum and Ably

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.