With more than a billion players worldwide, online games are a significant cultural, social, and economic phenomenon. And while innovative gameplay gets people through the door, it’s the social aspect of online gaming that keeps them playing. That puts social functionality front and center when it comes to the difference between an ongoing hit and an expensive flash in the pan. And players are quite particular about how they want to engage with others.

Imagine you’re running a logistics business. Your asset tracking stops working, and the only way for customers to get in touch is via email or phone. As calls and emails pile in, your support team becomes stretched - and customers become frustrated as they have to wait to have their calls taken and emails answered. Now imagine if instead the customer who first experienced the issue could have accessed a live chat service, and easily let your customer service team know what was going on.

You use realtime communication every day. It is the simultaneous exchange of information between a sender and a receiver with almost zero latency. Internet, landlines, mobile/cell phones, instant messaging (IM), internet relay chat, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and robotic telepresence are all examples of realtime communication systems. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a web based realtime chat app using Laravel, Ably and Vue.js.

The joke used to be that no piece of software was complete until it could send and receive email. Fast forward to today, replace email with realtime chat, and actually you might not be too far from the truth. Whether you’re delivering customer service, connecting community members, or helping colleagues communicate, realtime chat is quickly becoming a standard part of the web developer’s toolkit.

Ensuring constant availability to your customers in the competitive digital world is crucial for long-term business growth. But availability is just one of the reasons why small business owners should invest in the right chat tool, helpdesk software, and virtual call systems, or a comprehensive solution with multiple built-in functionalities.

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.

Here at Ably, we’ve helped many people to solve some truly interesting, and at times wacky data distribution problems. Be it helping to organise transport for the healthcare sector, or acting as one of the key communication layers on a VR platform; in more and more aspects of our lives, we’re expecting online experiences to happen in realtime. Unsurprisingly though, one key use-case reemerges every time: chat.

Turbo and ActionCable make it a snap to create Rails applications that respond to user behavior in real-time. In this article, Abiodun shows us how to use them together to create a full-featured chat application in Rails.

This post will walk through the creation of a realtime chat application with Next.js and deploying it to Vercel. You'll learn how to: Check out a running version of the app.