Alternatives to Ably

Which messaging service (Pusher vs. PubNub vs. Google Cloud Pub/Sub) to use for IoT?

Recently we finished long research on chat tool for our students and mentors. In the end we picked Mattermost Team Edition as the cheapest and most feature complete option. We did consider building everything from scratch and use something like Pusher or Twilio on a backend, but then we would have to implement all the desktop and mobile clients and all the features oursevles. Mattermost gave us flexible API, lots of built in or easy to install integrations and future-proof feature set. We are still integrating it with our main platform but so far the team, existing mentors and students are very happy.

I love Python and JavaScript . You can do the same JavaScript async operations in Python by using asyncio. This is particularly useful when you need to do socket programming in Python. With streaming sockets, data can be sent or received at any time. In case your Python program is in the middle of executing some code, other threads can handle the new socket data. Libraries like asyncio implement multiple threads, so your Python program can work in an asynchronous fashion. PubNub makes bi-directional data streaming between devices even easier.

Vue.js vuex Quasar Framework PubNub Apache Cordova Spring Boot We built our phone app using apache cordova since it has plugins for all native mobile functionality that we needed , and it saved us time rather than maintaining separate native swift and android codebase. We used an upcoming framework called quasar that helped us bootstrap our cordova project in vue js , and also has a ton of built in vue components. In order to push data to our phone on the fly , we used pubnub. It was super easy to add in a few lines to code to do this. We would save data on the server , and use pubnub to communicate updates to all the clients. Another nifty feature offered by pubnub that we used was mobile notifications delivery. : you send data to pubnub who inturn forward it to apns or firebase depending on the payload. On the server side we used plain old spring boot application , and configured cross domain communication to allow requests from ://file domain. ( Corodva app is a bunch of web html files packaged as app ).

We also heavily used cordova plugins to talk to phone , eg. cordova-plugin-calendar and cordova-plugin-local-notification : The second one was used to generate notifications from within the app , when the app is already open but you are in a different screen and want user to be notified . If the app is not open native push notifications delivered through apns / firebase would show.

I am pretty happy with out decision . other than the fact that quasar framework got recently upgraded to v1 and some of the newer components that replace the older ones do not maintain the same look and feel , an example of that is linked below.

Socket.IO is great for building real-time systems like chat. It's effectively a nice wrapper around WebSockets, with the ability to fallback to other methods for browsers that don't support it. We just used it to implement real-time collaboration at BaseDash, including a chat system like you're looking to build.

Node.js is probably the correct choice, especially if you're already familiar with it You'll probably still need to build an API to send requests to your server, and then use Socket.IO to push messages to your clients. This will let you authenticate users and store messages on your database so you can retrieve them later. PostgreSQL and MongoDB are good options for your database, you should be fine either way. Don't worry about speed, they'll both be sufficient.

React on the front end makes it really simple to handle real-time updating data. Again, even better since you're already familiar.

I use Socket.IO because the application has 2 frontend clients, which need to communicate in real-time. The backend-server handles the communication between these two clients via websockets. Socket.io is very easy to set up in Node.js and ExpressJS.

In the research project, the 1st client shows panoramic videos in a so called cave system (it is the VR setup of our research lab, which consists of three big screens, which are specially arranged, so the user experience the videos more immersive), the 2nd client controls the videos/locations of the 1st client.

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

This time I want to share something different. For those that have read my stack decisions, it's normal to expect some advice on infrastructure or React Native. Lately my mind has been focusing more on product as a experience than what's it made of (anatomy). As a tech leader, I have to worry about things like: are we taking enough time for reviews? Are we improving over time? Are we faster now? Is our code of higher quality?

For all these questions you can add many great recommendations on your pipeline. We use Trello for bug-tracking and project management. We use https://danger.systems/js/ to add checks for linting, type-enforcing and other quality dimensions in our PRs and a great feature from Vercel that let's you previsualize deployments directly in a PR. However it's not easy to measure this improvements over time. For customer matters we have Amplitude or Firebase analytics, but for our internal process? That's a little bit more complicated.

I collaborated recently with some folks in a small startup as an early adopter to create a metrics dashboard for engineers. I tried to add the tool to stackshare.io but still it doesn't appear as one of the options, please take a look on it over product hunt and let us know https://www.producthunt.com/posts/scope-6

I'm working on a project where I need to both send real-time updates for specific data sets, along with providing notifications to the users after long-running processes have been completed (SSE).

The project is using .NET Framework, AngularJS, & MSSQL. I understand that SignalR is nice as a polyfill for .NET and you can scale with a backplane, but I was wondering if there was a more efficient/effective technology for this?

Hi everyone! I am trying to implement a chat module in my product but it is not stable. My backend is in ASP.NET Core with EF Core, and my frontend is in Angular. Since I am already using dotnet, I used SignalR as a socket connection provider. At the moment, it works when the user logs in, the chats are loaded and the user is notified if there is any unread message just like any other app does by displaying a badge and number of unread chats. When the user navigates to chat, it loads the messages of chat. To avoid user waiting for messages I have stored the messages locally in a state management store and when the user switches the chat, it first loads messages from the store and then sends a request to server if there is any other message that is not on local.

The problem starts with multiple connections when single account is connected from multiple clients/browsers. From backend, I check if user is connected to SignalR socket then I send the message to all connections of user it does not work properly, this part is highly unstable. secondly, How can I improve the response of message loading? I only load 25 messages at the start.

Is there any article describing how Slack, Google Chat or MS Teams is handling the browser chat? it would be of great help.

Thanks