There’s unprecedented demand for multiplayer products. That is, products with features that support realtime, shared live and collaborative experiences between users. There’s been explosive growth in the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) sector through the pandemic, but collaboration isn’t just about the Zooms and Slacks of the world.

Not so long ago, email was considered revolutionary. Being able to send a message to someone on the other side of the world and receive a reply in a matter of minutes was a game-changer. Today, however, email is the slow-moving dinosaur of the Internet. Now, users expect instantaneous feedback from their online interactions and to communicate with people and machines instantly.

This article explains how Ably complements Kafka to reach end-users on the public internet.

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a revolution. Customers increasingly expect their online experiences to be interactive, immersive, and realtime by default. The need to satisfy user expectations is driving the exponential growth of event-driven architectures in organizations of all shapes and sizes. And by enabling users to have realtime experiences whenever and wherever they want, 24/7, mobile drives this change further and faster.

When it comes to the apps we rely on everyday for chatting with family, checking how close our delivery is, and collaborating with colleagues in a shared whiteboard, we expect seamless realtime experiences without delays or downtime. Ably surveyed over 500 engineering leaders about the challenges of building realtime edge messaging infrastructure in-house to power these shared live experiences.

Computing advances have taken us full circle. From terminals and a mainframe to individual personal computers, to cloud-based centralization again. Today, the devices we carry with us exceed the power of those original mainframes. They connect and inform us with a range of responsive, live experiences. Where would we be without live sports scores, online chat, order-delivery tracking, or synchronized document collaboration?

A recent GartnerⓇ report recognizes Ably as playing a critical role in powering meaningful online experiences by extending event-driven architectures to the edge. Within the spectrum of event-driven architecture use cases, Ably reaches end-user devices with last-mile connectivity: it’s at the heart of what we do. Ably is edge messaging!

We're excited to announce the Ably VS Code extension! With this extension you can manage your Ably applications directly from VS Code.

The Ably Kafka Connector has a raft of new enhancements, and is now available in a full general availability (GA) release. Developers now have the option to use pattern-based mapping rules to enable streaming of data from many Kafka topics to many Ably channels - ideal for chat solutions, live sports updates, live streaming, broadcasting notifications and alerts.

At its most simple, user presence represents a user’s online or offline status and is typically used to show whether a user is available, for example, on a chat system. Here are some other examples of where it’s used: Presence is a key feature of live apps and services and a primary element of the user experience in audience engagement. It is a great way to build a sense of immediacy between participants; knowing who else is online builds a sense of inclusion and interaction.