May 2018 Summaries

Ably, a realtime messaging platform, recently discovered a bug in Android VM that caused some data not to be delivered as expected on certain devices. The issue was found while building a subscriber client using the Java client library SDK with Android. It appeared that messages were missing metadata such as event name on specific versions of Samsung Galaxy tablets. The problem was traced back to a string comparison operation in the code, which used the == operator instead of the equals(Object) method for testing equality. Upon further investigation, it was confirmed that the Java VM on this particular device had a bug in handling interned strings. Ably has updated its library and no longer relies on the affected behavior of the Java VM. Developers who encounter similar issues should consider employing workarounds accordingly.

Subscription services and business models are on the rise, with companies like Spotify, Netflix, Dollar Shave Club, and Amazon's Prime membership adopting this approach. Even relatively low-consideration items can work within a subscription offering. SaaS businesses are arguably the masters of subscription-based propositions and models, focusing on delivering great products/services with excellent customer support. By thinking like SaaS businesses, companies can improve their focus on product and service quality, loyalty and value, operational rhythm, and global competitiveness. Adopting a subscription model can lead to increased business value for both customers and shareholders.

Running a tech startup and rapidly expanding a team presents significant challenges, as experienced by a company following a late seed round in 2017, leading to a strategic adoption of various tech tools to optimize growth and operations. The company emphasizes that no single perfect tool exists for every functionality, necessitating a diverse toolkit for areas like customer support, marketing, sales, collaboration, communication, office management, and PaaS technology. Tools such as Freshdesk and Intercom enhance customer support and engagement, while marketing efforts are streamlined using MailChimp, Revue, and Upsri.be for newsletters and email campaigns. Sales management sees a transition from Capsule to PipeDrive and Klenty, while Asana replaces Trello for project management due to team expansion. BlueJeans improves communication with seamless video conferencing, and Timetastic automates holiday planning. The company prefers Google Drive for document management, integrates 1Password for security, and relies on Amazon's cloud infrastructure for hosting. Lastly, GlobalSign is utilized for enhanced security measures, and Ably's APIs are recommended for building real-time applications, showcasing an extensive list of tools to support startup operations.

JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are a secure method for ensuring trust and authenticity between two parties on the internet. Ably Realtime recently added official support for JWT authentication as part of its existing Token Auth mechanism. JWT can be used with Ably in two ways: 1) generating an Ably JWT using the API key, or 2) embedding an Ably token within an existing JWT. The JWT is made up of a header, payload, and signature, which contain information about the token type, hashing algorithm, application API key, and more. Currently, Ably supports HS256 as the hashing algorithm for signing JSON Web Tokens.

In this article, the author discusses three common challenges faced by game and live event developers while building real-time applications. These include handling a theoretically limitless number of bettors receiving live updates (Problem 1), ensuring data synchronization across devices (Problem 2), and managing upstream game play events (Problem 3). The author provides solutions to these problems using patterns such as Pub/Sub, serial JSON patches, CRDTs, and message queues. These patterns help in scaling downstream data to devices, maintaining data integrity, and ensuring fault tolerance in the system.