April 2017 Summaries

rltm.js is a newly introduced universal API designed for real-time communication, enabling developers to create real-time applications with a single codebase while easily switching between various real-time messaging backends. It functions as a protocol adapter that ensures interoperability between clients and messaging APIs, offering convenient methods for handling messages, rooms, users, and message persistence, and determining online presence in real-time. Compatible with both front-end web and Node.js environments, rltm.js allows seamless transition between real-time services through simple configuration. Initially supporting Socket.IO and PubNub, the library aims to aid developers who find scaling their own real-time networks challenging and costly, providing an easy transition to PubNub's service. PubNub also offers open-source libraries, examples, and tutorials, enhancing the shared real-time development ecosystem.

HIPAA, established in 1996 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sets federal standards for the protection of protected health information (PHI) and electronic PHI (ePHI), with non-compliance fines reaching up to $1.5 million or more. Companies like PubNub, which provides real-time technology solutions, emphasize HIPAA compliance to ensure the secure transmission of sensitive health data. PubNub offers a range of security features, including encryption and access control, and is the only HIPAA-compliant real-time messaging provider, enabling healthcare applications to focus on innovation without compromising data security. The HIPAA framework includes four main rules: Privacy, Security, Enforcement, and Breach Notification, each outlining various safeguards to protect PHI and ePHI. PubNub has been HIPAA-compliant since 2015 and also ensures compliance with other data privacy laws, underlining the importance of adhering to these standards to protect sensitive health information and avoid substantial penalties.

In Part Two of a series on the PubNub Angular 2 SDK, the tutorial advances from basic implementation to exploring more sophisticated features like Presence and Custom State within the PubNub Angular 2 API. It guides users in setting up their environment by obtaining unique PubNub publish/subscribe keys and enabling necessary features for leveraging history and presence functionalities. The tutorial includes detailed instructions on creating a real-time chat application, covering both the user interface and backend code implementation using Angular2 and JavaScript. The application demonstrates online/offline detection and user state attributes such as mood, while also integrating a straightforward chat interface. Essential dependencies, including Angular2 modules, PubNub services, and Bootstrap for UI presentation, are highlighted. The tutorial concludes with the setup of Angular2 components and modules, ensuring a functional real-time chat experience with a minimal amount of code.

The text explores the concept of reducing dependency on extensive JavaScript frameworks by leveraging modern web standards like plain CSS and JavaScript, suggesting that frameworks are not as crucial as they once were. It demonstrates this through a minimalist example of creating a web framework in less than 20 lines of code, emphasizing the utility of Flexbox for layout and newer JavaScript APIs for DOM manipulation and event handling. The article further illustrates the use of default fonts and icon sets like Font Awesome to enhance styling. It concludes that while comprehensive frameworks can add value, basic web development can be efficiently achieved with minimal code, thanks to advancements in modern web technologies.

Wia enables the future of the Internet of Things (IoT) by facilitating communication between devices, servers, and smartphones through a globally available cloud API, making it easier for developers to create complex applications. This article provides a tutorial on using Wia and PubNub services to track and display IoT events in a real-time Angular 2 web application. It emphasizes the importance of tracking technical and business metrics for large-scale applications to ensure service continuity and business health. The Wia IoT Messaging API allows quick tracking, displaying, and dissemination of metrics from devices, offering rapid insight and response capabilities. The tutorial guides users through obtaining PubNub developer keys, setting up a Wia developer account, creating a PubNub BLOCK for serverless code execution, and developing a user interface using Angular 2 to visualize IoT data. The article also highlights the additional features of the Wia service APIs, such as tracking device information, custom events, sensor data, location data, and logs, while offering a glimpse into future articles that will further explore IoT technologies and web service APIs.

In an era characterized by overwhelming data proliferation from websites, devices, and services, the ability to organize and analyze this information is crucial for informed decision-making and understanding customer behavior. This tutorial demonstrates the construction of real-time analytics using Keen IO and PubNub, platforms that facilitate the collection, exploration, and visualization of data without the need for managing a personal database. Keen IO offers analytics as a service, enabling users to track events from various sources and perform customized queries without SQL, while also providing complex visualizations and reporting capabilities. The process involves server-side code to publish event data to a PubNub channel and transfer data to Keen IO using scheduled tasks via Cron jobs. This setup is ideal for scenarios requiring the real-time transmission and analysis of diverse data streams, such as assessing microclimates, with Keen IO's inbuilt functions aiding in deriving insights from the aggregated data.

HTML5, the latest evolution of the HTML standard, introduces new elements, attributes, and behaviors that enhance the capabilities of web applications, including the ability to create more app-like experiences through features such as the Notification API. This tutorial explains how to integrate the HTML5 Notification API to send and receive real-time browser notifications, a feature increasingly used by websites to emulate app-like behavior. The tutorial outlines the process of setting up notifications, checking for browser support, requesting user permission, and utilizing PubNub to handle real-time messaging. Additionally, HTML5's broader support for device APIs, semantics, offline storage, and multimedia highlights its lasting impact and extensive use in modern web applications, as seen in platforms like Facebook, where notifications are displayed without page refresh through the Notification API.