Live chat, multiplayer collaboration, and notifications are now standard expectations in web apps. Building them usually means standing up and running realtime infrastructure alongside your frontend.
We’ve launched a Next.js Starter Kit on the Vercel Templates Marketplace to shorten that path. It’s a prebuilt template that gets you from an empty project to a working realtime app faster.
What you can build with it
The starter kit helps frontend developers add realtime experiences to Next.js applications. It covers five common patterns:
- Multiplayer collaboration
- Live chat
- Data synchronization
- Data broadcast
- Notifications
It’s a starting point, so you’ll still decide which of these fit your app and how far to take them.
Why Next.js and Ably fit together
Next.js is a React-based JavaScript framework created by Vercel. Frontend developers use it to build fast, user-friendly web applications.
Ably adds the realtime layer. We provide the infrastructure and APIs for shared, collaborative experiences, and developers at thousands of companies use the platform to add realtime features to their apps. You don’t provision or manage that infrastructure yourself.
Get started
If you want to see how the pieces fit together, follow our step-by-step tutorial to build a realtime chat app with Ably and Next.js.
Also new: Netlify and Terraform
The starter kit is part of a wider effort to make Ably easier to adopt in the tools you already use. Two recent additions:
- Ably is now on the Netlify Integrations Hub, so Netlify developers can add realtime functionality to their web apps.
- The Ably Terraform Provider lets you manage your Ably infrastructure as code.
Try Ably for free and start building realtime apps with the framework you already use.
