Chat apps reference guide
This guide helps developers to understand key features of Ably most relevant to chat. It combines learning materials from documentation, demos and tutorials, and presents them in the context of building realtime chat applications.
- Understand where Ably fits into your architecture
- Learn about the core Ably concepts for chat
- See how Ably can power different chat features
- Discover the in-depth resources available
How Ably works
Ably offers a set of simple APIs to stream data between devices in realtime. Use these data streams and events to power realtime features in your application, providing live experiences to your end-users.
The Ably APIs follow a pub/sub pattern and the platform ensures that any messages published to Ably are received in realtime by any number of subscribing devices. Ably provides support for WebSockets by default, with other fallback transports in place, and its distributed infrastructure dynamically scales to support your realtime traffic.
Ably can be positioned at the heart of your architecture and used as an integral messaging platform between front-end and back-end clients, as well as to integrate with your existing architecture and other 3rd party services.
Ably Client Library SDKs are available in multiple programming languages and suitable for developing front-end and back-end client applications. Ably Integrations enable outbound and inbound data streaming to and from your services, such as databases and stream processors.
Diagram 1: Ably in your System Design
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