March 2016 Summaries

Slack is a messaging app that excels in its integrations with other apps and tools, allowing it to become a central hub for managing work. It has gained popularity among startups and developers, but marketers are also finding ways to use it effectively. Three key uses of Slack for digital marketing include media and social monitoring, customer engagement and support, and data and analytics. By integrating various tools into dedicated Slack channels, marketers can streamline their workflow and keep track of important information in one place.

Rails 5 has introduced WebSocket support via ActionCable, a significant move towards real-time functionality for the Rails community. While it helps remove boilerplate code and provides a simple API, developers should understand its strengths and weaknesses before deploying it in production environments. The architecture of ActionCable is based on Redis Pub/Sub feature, with each stream using a separate Redis channel. WebSocket connections are made from clients to the server, allowing data to flow in both directions between servers and client browsers or devices. ActionCable has several advantages such as simple connection objects and shared authentication, bi-directional Sockets, and Redis backend. It also supports common use cases like site notifications and alerts, single page apps, content streams, and live chat for websites. However, it also has some limitations including loss of connection state during abrupt disconnections, single point of failure backed by Redis Pub/Sub, latency issues due to geographical distance between servers and clients, and lack of acknowledgement or recovery mechanisms for message failures. Moreover, ActionCable does not support older browsers or devices where WebSockets are blocked, and it lacks platform interoperability and decoupling as there are no client libraries available for other platforms like iOS, Android, Go, Python etc. Performance testing revealed that connection time is not linear with ActionCable, and the time taken per server for publishing operations grows exponentially as workload increases. In conclusion, while ActionCable provides a significant step forward for Rails developers in terms of real-time functionality, it may not be suitable for all applications due to its limitations. Developers should consider these factors when deciding whether to use ActionCable or an alternative pub/sub messaging system.

Econsultancy founder Ashley Friedlein has announced his new role as Chairman and investor of early stage tech venture Ably, while continuing his work at Econsultancy. He is particularly interested in the company's talented team, its focus on realtime messaging and streaming data for developers, and its SaaS business model. Friedlein believes that realtime data management will become increasingly important across various sectors, including IoT applications, customer service, live updates, and marketing experiences. He is excited to be part of a company that provides vital infrastructure for this future.

The author shares their passion for programming and how it led them to create Ably, a realtime messaging platform-as-a-service. They discuss the challenges they faced while developing realtime apps using Ruby on Rails and how Node.js emerged as a more suitable option due to its inherent asynchronous model. The author then highlights the shortcomings of existing realtime messaging services, which prompted them to create Ably with deterministic, highly available, stateful, consistent, and protocol-agnostic features. They acknowledge the challenges faced during development but emphasize that the immense complexity and investment made in their product have created significant barriers to entry for competitors. Today, Ably is officially production-ready, offering developers dependable realtime messaging and data stream capabilities.

UK-based realtime messaging platform Ably has officially launched after three years of development by a team led by Econsultancy co-founder Matthew O'Riordan and former Tao Group CTO Paddy Byers. The platform is designed to help developers add realtime messaging and streaming data to applications, with features such as True High Availability, extremely low latencies globally, message delivery during outages, and protocol agnosticism. Ably's unique selling points include its ability to maintain connection state for each client, offer both short-term and long-term message durability, and ensure chronological delivery of messages.