April 2018 Summaries

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will start applying on 25 May 2018, affecting businesses operating within the EU or handling personal data of EU citizens. Businesses must ensure that all personal data is stored and processed in compliance with GDPR requirements. This includes storing data within the EU unless specific criteria are met, allowing individuals to request deletion of their data, implementing procedures for managing message history, ensuring proper agreements between data controllers and processors, maintaining high security standards, and having a plan in place for detecting and reporting data breaches. Businesses should conduct a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) and enable customers to withdraw consent for processing their personal data.

Roundup #1 - Cryptocurrency & Sales Partnerships: Realtime technology is revolutionizing various sectors of the tech landscape, and this monthly round-up aims to highlight some of these innovations. One example is Coinstocks.io, a US-based cryptocurrency exchange platform that utilizes realtime infrastructure with Pub/Sub messaging system for instantaneous updates on price changes and orders. Another example is PartnerTap, a Seattle-based company focusing on enhancing B2B partnerships through chat applications. By connecting sales executives with referral partners via chat apps, PartnerTap aims to speed up the level of execution and collaboration. Both these examples demonstrate the importance of reliable realtime features in ensuring smooth communication and efficient operations.

Ably, a cloud infrastructure and API provider for realtime messaging, recently migrated its main project from JavaScript to TypeScript. The motivation behind this migration was the need for a more strongly typed language to overcome challenges faced with JavaScript in complex projects. TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that allows developers to convert existing JavaScript projects into ones containing type definitions and other features that make maintenance and scalability easier. Ably's approach to migration involved setting up a TypeScript configuration, converting the most frequently used files first, and then progressively converting other files while ensuring tests still passed. The benefits of migrating to TypeScript include better error handling, improved code maintenance, and easier onboarding for new engineers.

In an exploration of challenges faced by betting app developers, the text outlines solutions for three major real-time data issues: limitless live update recipients, data synchronization, and upstream gameplay events. To tackle the first issue, it recommends using a pub/sub architecture, which decouples event producers and consumers, allowing apps to scale efficiently without redesigning system architecture. For data synchronization, the text suggests using Serial JSON Patches and CRDTs to maintain data integrity while minimizing bandwidth usage, ensuring updates are reliable and ordered. Finally, it addresses upstream gameplay events by employing message queues and serverless architecture to manage spikes in activity, ensuring messages are processed in order and preventing failures. Ably's infrastructure, based on its Four Pillars of Dependability, offers robust solutions for these challenges, providing scalability, reliability, and integrity in real-time data handling.

The article discusses the importance of second-screening for sports and betting app users, with 90% of US adults now online while watching TV. It highlights six key issues that could lead to customer churn in realtime UX for these apps. These include high latency, unsynchronized screens, loss of connection when changing networks, unreliable uptime, incorrect data delivery order, and inability to handle spikes in demand. The article suggests that addressing these issues can improve the user experience and reduce customer churn.

Recent industry research emphasizes the importance of providing users with optimal online experiences in the data delivery sector. Salmon's study reveals that 88% of customers prioritize speed of delivery over brand when choosing who to buy from, and only 6.5% of millennials are considered 'brand loyal.' The risks associated with offering subpar real-time experiences become even more apparent when considering second-screen users, as 90% of US adults use a second screen while watching TV. To ensure customer satisfaction, developers should aim for at least 99.999% uptime. Ably Realtime has addressed this issue by embedding intelligence in their client library SDKs to detect degraded performance or network issues and autonomously route traffic to alternative healthy data centers. This unique feature ensures that customers are typically offline for no more than 10 seconds at any time. Tennis Australia's choice of Ably as its new data transfer partner for the Australian Open highlights the importance of second-screen reliability in providing real-time scores, updates, and commentary to a global fanbase.

The Ably platform has recently added official support for the MQTT protocol through their [MQTT gateway](https://www.ably.io/adapters). MQTT, or Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is a network protocol designed specifically to enable efficient communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Unlike HTTP, it uses the publish/subscribe paradigm instead of request/response for communication. In this model, all clients are either publishers or subscribers, or both, and there's a central entity that manages message routing from publishers to the correct subscribers. This central entity is called an MQTT broker in Ably terminology. MQTT has three main entities: publishers, who push data/messages to the broker; subscribers, who inform the broker of their interest in a certain kind of data and receive it when available; and the broker itself, which ensures correct routing of messages published by publishers to the appropriate subscriber(s). Topics are used as naming specific sets of data. Ably's MQTT Protocol Adapter serves as an internal translation layer that translates client-side endpoints intended to connect with a third-party protocol into one compatible with Ably. This allows for seamless integration between Ably and other platforms or services using the MQTT protocol. Compared to WebSockets, which is widely used in realtime technology, MQTT caters specifically to low bandwidth scenarios and implements the Pub/Sub messaging pattern at the protocol level. It also ensures efficient communication while minimizing battery consumption on hardware devices, making it ideal for use with IoT devices. To set up Ably's MQTT Protocol Adapter, users can follow the steps outlined in the documentation or try out a tutorial that demonstrates building a classic game of Snake using MQTT. When using the MQTT adapter, it is recommended to use token authentication for security purposes, especially when dealing with IoT devices or client-side applications where API keys may be exposed.