January 2021 Summaries

Ably has released its Flutter plugin v1.0, making it easier for developers to add WebSocket-based pub/sub messaging to their Flutter applications. The Ably Flutter plugin is a wrapper around the fully-featured Cocoa and Java client library SDKs, providing iOS and Android support for those using Flutter and Dart. The plugin supports major Ably functionality such as Pub/Sub messaging, with features like Presence and Message History soon to come. Developers can follow an in-depth tutorial on building a realtime cryptocurrency app with Flutter using the Ably Flutter plugin.

Ably is a comprehensive platform that simplifies the implementation of realtime communication in EdTech applications, allowing engineers to focus on product development. The platform emphasizes the importance of a robust infrastructure to deliver instantaneous experiences with a 99.999% uptime guarantee. Key requirements for such infrastructure include predictable performance, data integrity, scalability, elasticity, and high availability, ensuring seamless experiences for users. As the EdTech sector grows, especially post-Covid-19, providers face the challenge of building or selecting reliable realtime capabilities. Cloud computing has proven advantageous for digital transformation by enabling rapid deployment and flexibility. Ably has developed solutions to efficiently design, deploy, and scale realtime functionalities, offering APIs that facilitate the creation of dependable realtime applications.

In the realm of EdTech, the demand for real-time capabilities is rapidly increasing, but building the necessary infrastructure presents significant challenges. These challenges include ensuring device and user presence, managing connection state recovery, guaranteeing message delivery and order, integrating push notifications, handling third-party integrations, and fostering ongoing innovation. The complexities of developing such a system require deep expertise in computer science and distributed systems, alongside significant resources and time. For many EdTech vendors, the decision to build real-time communication in-house can be daunting due to the unpredictable nature of scalability and availability, often leading to the consideration of leveraging existing platforms like Ably. Ably is positioned as a solution to these challenges, offering an enterprise-ready real-time communication platform that enables efficient design, rapid deployment, and seamless scaling of real-time functionalities, allowing EdTech developers to focus on innovation rather than foundational infrastructure.