UPDATE June 2019: we now support SSE (and MQTT as of 2018).
Realtime data delivery platform Ably has united five previously disconnected realtime protocols: Ably, Pusher, PubNub, AMQP, STOMP. This means developers can now migrate between platforms incredibly easily and avoid protocol lock-in. Realtime can now be opened up to everyone and pushed to the next stage.
Next generation realtime experiences
The realtime web is part of the next wave of digital customer experiences. This week Google announced an extension to their Popular Times feature, added to Google Maps and search in July 2015, so there is now a live feed of how busy a place is right now.
Customers have come to expect live chat, live document editing, live gaming, and live visualizations of their taxi coming to pick them up etc. etc.
Realtime meets IoT
The Internet of Things heralds a whole new era of internet-enabled connectivity.
With smart homes, smart cities, digital outdoor media, smart cars and so on all fast evolving there is a growing need to connect the physical with the digital, often via a mobile phone, and, increasingly, in realtime. We are coming to expect ‘live’, on-demand, experiences which blend the real world and the digital.
The technical challenges
But there are big challenges from a technical point of view with the required infrastructure to support this.
The Internet of Things has its own particular protocols, like MQQT, which are specifically designed to suit IoT use cases. And current realtime technology platforms typically prefer to use their own native protocols which means integrations can become onerous and complex as realtime becomes a more pervasive and important data transport mechanism across all parts of your technical infrastructure.
Ably Adapters makes realtime “plug & play”
Ably is thus excited to announce the official launch of Ably Adapters which provides interoperability between five realtime protocols (Ably, Pusher, PubNub, AMQP, STOMP) with other open protocols, such as MQTT, being added soon.
Matthew O’Riordan, CEO and co-founder of Ably, comments:
“Ably believes in a vision for digital experiences that are increasingly realtime, including smart notifications and many other emerging use cases.
To make this possible, and accelerate its evolution, we believe in interoperability as this approach makes it easy to connect services and systems. Realtime can quickly be integrated across technical infrastructures and plugged into your ecosystem.
We do not believe in lock-in and are happy to support all the protocols we can, including even our competitors”.
Find out more about Ably protocol adapters and how they work.
