Company
Date Published
Author
Adam Bavosa
Word count
1473
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

PubNub Signals is a new feature within the PubNub Publish-Subscribe (Pub/Sub) API designed for sending real-time data between devices with cost efficiency, particularly suitable for high-frequency, small-sized, non-critical messages like IoT sensor updates, GPS streams in ride-share apps, and chat app typing indicators. While similar to standard Publishes with a payload of up to 32KB, Signals are limited to 64 bytes and do not store history or trigger external mobile push notifications, but they maintain the same reliability and latency. Signals are ideal for scenarios where the flow of data matters more than the content of individual messages, reducing costs and unnecessary overhead associated with global replication and history storage in high-volume data streams. A demo illustrates the use of PubNub Signals in a chat application, highlighting the simplicity and affordability of implementing typing indicators at scale, and emphasizes the need for users to obtain their own PubNub API keys for integration.