April 2021 Summaries

Over the past 18 months, demand for global and last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services has increased significantly. Real-time location data is crucial for these services, enabling delightful user experiences and optimizing operations. However, implementing real-time asset tracking can be complex and resource-intensive. To address this issue, Ably has partnered with Mapbox to launch Ably Asset Tracking, a serverless service designed specifically for asset tracking in last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. This solution simplifies cloud architecture, allowing Dev & Ops teams to focus on core product engineering. It also provides high position accuracy, low latency, and seamless end-user experiences. Ably Asset Tracking is now available in public beta with SDKs for Android, iOS, and web.

Online banking interest is rapidly increasing as more financial institutions build digital products and improve their core capabilities to meet user expectations in the instantaneous, always-on, realtime world. Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform, has become a popular choice for architecting event-driven realtime banking ecosystems due to its low latency, scalability, high throughput, data integrity, durability, and high availability characteristics. By combining Kafka with Ably, an intelligent Internet-facing messaging layer optimized for last-mile delivery, banks can deliver dependable realtime banking apps that provide seamless user experiences while maintaining the highest standards of security and reliability.

This article discusses the implementation of a signaling mechanism for WebRTC using Fable and Ably. WebRTC is a browser technology that allows exchanging data among N peers via either the UDP or TCP protocol, without a server in the middle except when Relay connection is used. The signaling process involves exchanging messages with SDP (Session Description Protocol) information. In this article, the author uses Ably's publish and subscribe functions to establish connections between peers. They also use the WebRTC-adapter library for browser compatibility assurance. The implementation includes handling different roles of sender and receiver, configuring callbacks for connection state changes and candidate exchange, and sending files via DataChannel. The conclusion emphasizes Ably's potential as a good out-of-the-box option for signaling in WebRTC applications.

Spring Boot is an application framework that simplifies the development of production-grade Spring-based applications, allowing developers to quickly set up sites with real-time features using WebSockets and Pub/Sub paradigms. This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to implementing a collaborative TODO list application using Spring Boot, WebSockets, and Ably for Pub/Sub messaging. The application leverages Spring Data JPA for database interactions, Thymeleaf for dynamic HTML content, and various REST controllers to handle client requests. By integrating Ably, the tutorial demonstrates how to achieve efficient real-time updates across clients without overloading the server. The project is further enhanced by containerizing it with Docker, making it easily deployable and scalable. The tutorial concludes with a preview of a future tutorial on implementing a robust authentication system using Auth0.