There is an entire category of problems in distributed computing that require a single client amongst a set of peers in a network to coordinate the behavior of all the other clients. It is common in systems responsible for processing queues of work that connect to downstream systems that don’t support concurrent connections. Or in systems where work is parallelized in a specific way.

WebTransport is a new specification offering an alternative to WebSockets. For applications that need low-latency, event-driven communication between endpoints, WebSockets has been the go-to choice, but WebTransport may change that. WebSockets is a technology that enables bidirectional, full-duplex communication between client and server over a persistent, single-socket connection. This allows for low-latency, realtime updates, and the creation of richer communication and gaming applications.

A simple example of online audience engagement could be a livestream with a host and a chat system for audience members to interact with each other in realtime. Other audience engagement solutions include features such as chat or Q&A for participants to communicate while sharing an experience, such as a Watch Party, and polls, quizzes, and leaderboards.

Sports betting is on the rise in the US as a growing number of states have recently legalized online and mobile sports betting. As of early 2022, sports betting is legal in 30 states and Washington, DC, with more expected to follow suit. The industry has seen massive growth since the Supreme Court ruled on it in 2018, with mobile apps increasingly being the chosen way for customers to place a wager.

I'm excited to announce the Ably Control API GitHub Action! With this Action you can create Ably apps and API keys straight from your GitHub workflow, ensuring a reliable and repeatable process of creating your cloud infrastructure.

This short post by a member of Ably's engineering team describes how we resolved a problem that is typical of the challenges we face each week. We thrive on solving hard distributed system problems that are mostly platform agnostic and theoretical in nature, and this is the first post in a long-term series of articles about things we've learned recently.

Over the last few years, companies have used realtime updates to add new experiences and features and increase their market share, It’s now standard to expect a page within an app or browser to update parts of itself without forcing it to refresh. For example, a news page of live sports scores updates with the latest goal scored, or an app shows a change as you track your taxi on a map.

This post describes how I built a realtime collaboration app that scrum teams can use for planning poker. Planning poker, also known as Scrum poker, is a gamified technique for estimating the size of user stories. This helps in deciding how many stories can be put into a sprint. Usually story points in the Fibonacci scale is used as a metric, but T-shirt sizing, like small, medium, and large, is also used.

Standardized a decade ago through RFC 6455, WebSocket has since matured into one of the main technologies powering the modern web. Designed to be event-driven and full-duplex, and optimized for minimum overhead and low latency, WebSockets have become a preferred choice for many organizations and developers seeking to build interactive, realtime digital experiences that provide delightful user experiences.

Here at Ably, we constantly strive to enhance our state-of-the-art product offering and to provide an industry-leading developer experience for our users. As a testament to our ongoing efforts, we’re delighted to announce that Ably has recently won three 2021 DevPortal Awards: The DevPortal Awards aims to: This is the second year running when Ably has taken part in the DevPortal Awards. In 2020, we won two DevPortal Awards.