Live chat: Ably guide and resources
This guide helps you to understand the Ably features that support live chat experiences. It combines materials from across documentation, demos and tutorials, to provide the resources you need to start building a realtime chat app.
- Learn about the core Ably concepts for chat
- Understand where Ably fits into your architecture
- See how Ably can power different chat features
How Ably works
Ably offers simple APIs to stream data between devices in realtime. Using these data streams and events you can power realtime features and provide live experiences to your end-users.
Ably’s messaging capabilities follow a pub/sub pattern and the platform ensures that any messages published to Ably are received in realtime by any number of subscribing devices. Ably provides support for WebSockets by default, with other fallback transports in place, and its distributed infrastructure dynamically scales to support your realtime traffic.
Ably can be positioned at the heart of your architecture and used as an integral messaging platform between front-end and back-end clients, as well as to integrate with your existing architecture and other 3rd party services.
Ably SDKs are available in multiple programming languages and suitable for developing front-end and back-end client applications. Ably Integrations enable outbound and inbound data streaming to and from your services, such as databases and stream processors.
Diagram 1: Ably in your System Design
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