April 2019 Summaries

This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on creating an iOS mobile chat app using Swift 5 and the PubNub platform, which facilitates real-time messaging and message storage. The tutorial covers setting up the app using Xcode, implementing PubNub's key features like Publish/Subscribe for real-time communication, and Storage & Playback for message persistence. It explains how to design the user interface with necessary views and navigation controls, handle user connections to chat channels, and manage message events using PubNub's API. The app supports sending and receiving messages instantly, storing message history, and retrieving past messages, ensuring that users can seamlessly leave and return to the chat. The tutorial also includes instructions on configuring PubNub with API keys, setting message retention times, and subscribing to channels, ultimately resulting in a functional chat application that can serve as a foundation for further development or integration into larger apps.

The tutorial explains how to create a JavaScript-based chat application that uses audible chirps for connecting users to channels through the Chirp WebAssembly SDK and PubNub JavaScript SDK. It guides users in setting up the project, including creating necessary files and directories, and incorporating the SDKs and necessary HTML elements for a functional chat interface. The application allows users to broadcast and join chats via chirps and includes modals to inform users about connection status and chat options. The tutorial emphasizes the importance of using unique keys from Chirp and PubNub for authentication and suggests hosting the application files on a server due to CORS restrictions, recommending a lightweight server for this purpose.

This tutorial series introduces a method for building a JavaScript chat application that leverages audible chirps to connect users to the same channel using the Chirp WebAssembly SDK and PubNub JavaScript SDK. By using Chirp, users can join a chat channel without manually entering channel details, needing only to enable microphone access and adjust speaker volume. The tutorial highlights various use cases for Chirp and PubNub, such as connecting players in multiplayer lobbies, provisioning IoT devices, and transmitting payment data. It details how to use Chirp's 16khz-mono protocol for sending and receiving data over sound in different environments and outlines the steps to create a chat application where a host transmits a chirp to connect users via PubNub. The tutorial also provides guidance on the necessary requirements, such as signing up for Chirp and PubNub accounts, and directs readers to the subsequent parts of the series for further learning.

The tutorial by Divyun Vaid of SourceFuse explains how to build a real-time collaborative spreadsheet using modern web technologies, specifically focusing on the transition of office suites from heavy desktop software to lightweight, browser-based applications. The guide details the setup and implementation of a collaborative spreadsheet using technologies such as PubNub for real-time APIs and Handsontable for the spreadsheet module. It covers essential features like showing online users, highlighting active cells, synchronizing changes across editing sessions, and maintaining an audit trail for updates. The tutorial emphasizes using PubNub's infrastructure to manage changes and user presence, while Parcel is employed for quick prototyping. It also introduces hooks to record and replay changes, ensuring that updates are propagated across all user sessions. The goal is to create a seamless collaborative experience where multiple users can interact with the spreadsheet in real-time from different locations and devices.

PubNub offers a "Powered by PubNub" badge to help businesses showcase their use of its global, real-time network, which ensures secure and scalable data transmission and supports millions of messages every hour. By embedding this badge, companies can enhance customer confidence and promote their products or services by associating with the PubNub brand. Additionally, PubNub incentivizes this marketing integration by offering free branded merchandise, such as shirts and stickers, to those who display the badge and share its location via a provided form.

Natural language processing (NLP) is becoming increasingly mainstream, with technologies such as Google Speech API, Siri, Alexa, and IBM Watson integrating seamlessly into daily tasks like playing music and scheduling meetings. This tutorial demonstrates how to implement a text-to-speech feature in a real-time AngularJS web application using the IBM Watson Text-to-Speech API and PubNub's data stream network. Text-to-speech technology is valuable for accessibility, reducing distractions while driving, and other scenarios where screens are unavailable, though challenges like pronunciation errors and robotic voices persist. The tutorial emphasizes the importance of high availability, performance, and security in deploying text-to-speech services, which are facilitated by PubNub's global data stream network. By leveraging PubNub BLOCKS, developers can easily integrate third-party applications and enhance their data stream processing with supplementary data like text-to-speech URIs, enabling straightforward audio playback within web applications. The tutorial guides users through setting up PubNub and IBM Watson services, demonstrating how to create a simple user interface and manage real-time data messaging to achieve seamless text-to-speech functionality.

This comprehensive tutorial explores the integration of PubNub with Ethereum blockchain technology to create a smart contract-based subscription service. The application is powered by a private Ethereum blockchain using Solidity, with the Truffle framework and Ganache to simulate and log transactions. Users can subscribe to a service via a web app, which utilizes smart contracts to enforce subscription rules across multiple business entities. PubNub plays a crucial role by sending real-time notifications of contract execution, enhancing the user experience by providing instant updates on transaction statuses. The tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to setting up the necessary software, compiling and deploying smart contracts, and testing the application, highlighting the potential of blockchain and smart contracts in transforming digital transactions and business processes.

Contactless and mobile payment technologies have experienced significant growth in recent years due to their simplicity, speed, convenience, and relative security, offering a modern alternative to traditional payment methods. Contactless payments utilize Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, allowing transactions without physical cash or card insertion by using contactless cards equipped with encoded chips and wireless antennas. On the other hand, mobile payments operate via mobile banking apps and mobile wallets, such as Apple Pay and Android Pay, which store credit card details in smartphones or smartwatches and also employ NFC to facilitate transactions. These systems provide a fast, flexible, and secure way to make payments, reflecting the technological advancements of the 21st century and highlighting a shift away from conventional cash-based methods. David Smith, a cryptographer with extensive experience in the sector, emphasizes that these payment methods are here to stay and will continue to evolve to enhance global payment systems.

PubNub offers a serverless platform for developers to build and deploy real-time applications effortlessly, eliminating the need to manage infrastructure by automatically handling load balancing and autoscaling. The platform allows developers to quickly create and deploy microservices worldwide, using its Functions feature which acts like a REST API, exemplified by a Hacker News clone app. The serverless approach provides benefits such as flexible scaling, high availability, and cost-efficiency, as users only pay for executed event handlers, while idle time is free. Applications maintain state using the KV Store, a No-SQL database solution, and can be managed through PubNub’s web editor or command line. The development process includes defining API routes for different functionalities and using the Functions feature to manage real-time data interactions, ensuring low latency across global data centers.