At first glance, sports fans, news geeks, and pop culture enthusiasts seem largely dissimilar. Often, as a result, the apps that serve these groups are largely different – with a sports app comparing the stats of different athletes and a celebrity news app sharing video interviews and gossip. But when these seemingly different users log on to these different apps, they’ll likely all expect the same thing: A fresh update published mere seconds after they opened the app.

Aurora is a managed database service from Amazon compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It allows for the use of existing MySQL code, tools, and applications and can offer increased performance for certain workloads compared to MySQL and PostgreSQL. Being an AWS product, it benefits from the range of tools and services available on AWS, with simple integrations for analytics and processing. Having all of these tools available makes building larger projects easier and quicker.

In our previous post, we provided the ultimate live chat features list - covering 15 features you should provide in your live chat or instant messaging app. Here, we cover how these features come to life across customer service, gaming, internal company chat, social and community chat, and chat for two way marketplaces.

Chat and instant messaging are a key part of how many applications are driving product adoption, user engagement, and retention. As a product owner or developer, you’re almost spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding how to implement chat in your product. In this article, we’re going to go deep and look at the protocols that power chat.

We're excited to share Ably’s newest feature, Subscription Filters. It gives subscribers to a channel the ability to easily create their own custom realtime data feeds, by selectively subscribing to receive only part of the data from the channel. For a publisher, the advantage is being able to create personalized data streams for large numbers of individual clients, without having to worry about the scalability, maintenance, and reliability of a complicated realtime data feed infrastructure.

Pushing data from the server to the client is a problem almost as old as the Web. In the early days, developers had to rely on ingenuity to achieve data push, often resulting in novel solutions like polling that compromised on performance. However, as the demand for realtime features surged, dedicated methods to send data from the server emerged. Today, you have four options: Which one is best?

Elasticity – the ability of software infrastructure to adapt and scale to fluctuations in usage – is an essential part of realtime updates. Elasticity is not a new problem but for realtime update systems, the challenge is different in two major ways: In a previous article, we walked through the fundamentals that comprise a successful realtime update infrastructure.

Live chat is the most common type of realtime web experience. Embedded in our everyday lives, we use messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Slack daily to keep in touch with friends and family, and to communicate and collaborate at work. With live chat functionality also prominent across e-commerce, live streaming, and e-learning experiences, end users have come to expect (near) instant message receipt and delivery.

You're overseeing your delivery logistics from your dashboard when an alarming notification surfaces - one of your drivers has had a minor accident and they're unable to finish their route. You start considering your options. Is there a replacement driver close by? Is there a spare vehicle available for the original driver? Just as you're figuring things out, another alert arrives: your driver is okay and the delivery is still on time.

Live chat is everywhere. From connecting distributed workers across continents, through providing an efficient customer service channel, to bringing together online communities, chat is central to how we communicate. This demand puts an unusual level of pressure on chat app operators to make sure that every message reaches its destination, every time.