WebRTC (Web Real-time Communication) is an industry effort to enhance the web browsing model. It allows browsers to directly exchange realtime media with other browsers in a peer-to-peer fashion through secure access to input peripherals like webcams and microphones. Traditional web architecture is based on the client-server paradigm, where a client sends an HTTP request to a server and gets a response containing the information requested. In contrast, WebRTC allows the exchange of data among N peers.

The timeline of commercial computing can be roughly summarized as: buying computers → renting computers → renting partial computers (virtual servers) → renting partial computers for very short periods (cloud computing).

If you are a Kotlin developer, there is a high chance you already know that coroutines are the new way of composing your asynchronous, concurrent and parallel workflows. It is also the recommended solution by Google to use for asynchronous programming in Android. In this blog post I will discuss the importance of asynchronous architecture. I will also explain how I combined Ably and Kotlin coroutines to develop a multiplayer game room SDK.

With the rise of cloud-based and distributed systems, messaging solutions appear to be everywhere. Rather than direct client-server communication, messaging and event-driven architecture allow loosely coupled components to communicate with each other and results in better scalability of the system.

A few weeks ago I saw this message in our internal support channel on Slack, and it made my gears grind. So I stopped to take a look, since the last thing we want is a customer taken advantage of. There are people out there on the internet cheeky enough to freeload off your account, and use up your monthly quotas. What's more: you may not know that it is happening.

How often do you face an issue with a service that doesn't work and you don’t know why? How often is it related to some external services, dependencies like a database, or queue mechanism you are using? Of course, you could check each service from time to time, and you could run some smoke tests against the service, but it will not give you an answer if “service is not working because the connection to MSSQL failed.”

I started working for Ably recently, at the beginning of 2022. One of the first tasks I was given was to build a demo project that used one of the Ably SDKs. Working as a backend Go developer for the past 4 years made my choice of SDK easy. I definitely wanted to work with ably-go. I found myself wondering how to explore, debug and test an SDK in a visual way, rather like how the Postman API Client interacts with an API.

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.