October 2015 Summaries

The text discusses how to implement real-time updates in a railway reservations system using Neo4j, a leading graph database, in conjunction with PubNub for real-time capabilities. The project aims to address the issue of users facing delays and missed bookings when trying to reserve emergency Tatkal train tickets on the Indian IRCTC portal, a problem exacerbated by the high volume of daily e-ticket bookings and the time-sensitive nature of these reservations. Although Neo4j excels in read and write performance, it lacks intrinsic real-time update features, which the tutorial compensates for by employing PubNub to push live seat availability data to users via a web interface. The solution involves creating and managing nodes and relationships in Neo4j to represent trains and stations and using JavaScript for the client-side interface to instantly reflect changes in ticket availability. This setup demonstrates a step towards achieving a real-time database by effectively bridging the server and client sides for immediate data updates.

PubNub has announced a partnership with Twitter to integrate its Global Data Stream Network into Twitter's Fabric developer toolset, allowing developers to access real-time messaging capabilities and third-party SDKs from a single platform. This collaboration aims to streamline the development of scalable, real-time mobile applications by enabling developers to combine PubNub's services with other SDKs seamlessly. Fabric offers a unified access point for SDK installation, reducing the time spent managing SDKs and enhancing focus on application development. Additionally, Fabric provides automatic key provisioning, simplifying the onboarding process and allowing developers to spend more time coding. PubNub looks forward to collaborating with the Fabric team to roll out its SDK on the platform in the coming months.

This tutorial outlines a method for transforming a Raspberry Pi into a text-to-speech audio broadcast service using its multimedia capabilities in conjunction with PubNub Data Streams for peer-to-peer communication. The system consists of a requester peer that sends text for conversion into speech and a broadcaster application on the Raspberry Pi that processes and outputs the audio. The setup requires configuring the Raspberry Pi with a USB sound card and installing necessary software packages such as ALSA utilities, mpg321, and espeak, which handles the text-to-speech conversion. Detailed instructions are provided for setting up the audio hardware, enabling the USB audio device, and testing the sound configuration to ensure proper functionality. The application utilizes Python scripts for operation, with the requester and broadcaster scripts interacting through PubNub messaging to synchronize the transmission and confirmation of broadcast requests. While espeak provides the basic text-to-speech capability, its output is described as robotic, and users are encouraged to explore commercial alternatives for more natural-sounding audio. The tutorial is part of a series of Raspberry Pi projects, encouraging users to modify and personalize the experience by altering scripts or messages.

An all-new Chat Resource Center has been launched, offering comprehensive overviews, tutorials, and design patterns for mobile and web chat development. Recent updates include a new Android WebRTC signaling API, which facilitates the creation of cross-platform WebRTC applications for mobile and web, allowing users to build native video and voice applications on Android. The tutorial provided gives a detailed walkthrough of building a mobile chat app similar to Skype for Android, covering aspects like signaling, interface design, incoming call management, real-time buddy lists, and text messaging. The Android WebRTC SDK ensures full compatibility with the JavaScript WebRTC SDK, enabling seamless mobile-to-web and web-to-mobile communication without additional technology. Users are encouraged to explore the web demo to experience real-time signaling between browsers and the Android application.

The blog post outlines the process of creating a real-time IoT dashboard that streams pressure data from a sensor connected to an Arduino board, using the EON JavaScript framework to visualize the data as a gauge chart. It details the setup of a server-side application using Node.js and npm packages such as PubNub and Johnny-Five to publish the sensor readings to a PubNub channel, and a client-side HTML application to display the gauge chart using EON's visualization capabilities. The tutorial emphasizes the scalability and flexibility of EON, which works with various boards and sensor modules, offering different types of charts for robust real-time visualizations, and provides guidance on setting up and running the program, including a live demonstration video.

PubNub has partnered with speakfree to support refugees by facilitating real-time communication between them and humanitarian organizations through a location-based instant messaging app. This collaboration addresses the critical need for accurate and timely information dissemination amid the global refugee crisis. The app, available on iOS and Android, automatically translates messages from aid organizations into six languages, including English, French, Arabic, Urdu, and Dari, allowing refugees to receive updates and communicate in their preferred language. Chat rooms for individual languages further enable refugees to connect with each other and local residents. Founder and CEO of speakfree, Peter Muehlberger, emphasized the app's rapid deployment and scalability, made possible by PubNub's technology, which helps break down communication barriers and alleviate the hardships faced by refugees.