Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

This post will walk through the creation of a realtime chat application with Next.js and deploying it to Netlify.

In any chat experience, creating a safe and welcoming environment is just as important as delivering messages in realtime. As online interactions scale, the need for effective moderation becomes essential, not only to protect users, but to maintain trust, foster community, and support healthy growth.

Long polling and WebSockets are two common techniques for delivering realtime data. While both have been used successfully in production systems, they differ significantly in how they perform, scale, and integrate into modern architectures. This guide compares long polling vs WebSockets to help engineering teams and technical decision-makers choose the right approach for delivering realtime experiences reliably and at scale.

We’re excited to announce Ably LiveObjects, launched with a radical vision: to enable any application to work with live, shared data that synchronizes instantly for users everywhere. Shared access to live data is no longer a nice-to-have - it’s becoming a foundational building block of every realtime digital experience.

Not every message in a realtime app needs to be available in message history, like in the rewind backlog or in persistent storage. Ably is introducing ephemeral messages to let you deliver transient updates - like reactions, typing indicators, or cursor positions - which are only delivered to clients that are connected at the moment the message is published.