Alternatives to PubNub

Which messaging service (Pusher vs. PubNub vs. Google Cloud Pub/Sub) to use for IoT?

Recently we finished long research on chat tool for our students and mentors. In the end we picked Mattermost Team Edition as the cheapest and most feature complete option. We did consider building everything from scratch and use something like Pusher or Twilio on a backend, but then we would have to implement all the desktop and mobile clients and all the features oursevles. Mattermost gave us flexible API, lots of built in or easy to install integrations and future-proof feature set. We are still integrating it with our main platform but so far the team, existing mentors and students are very happy.

Hi,

I am a student and a junior developer who is a graduating candidate in comp sci major. I am about to start building my final year project which is a real-time messaging application for software developers to Enhance Knowledge Exchange and Problem Solving. It is mainly a chat application with more enhanced features. I am planning to use React and React Native for the frontend and cross-platform mobile apps, Node.js and ExpressJS for the backend, GraphQL for fetching and manipulating data from the backend and PostgreSQL for the database, and finally Socket.IO for the real-time chatting and communication. I would highly appreciate it if anyone here with experience in building similar apps to tell me if I made a good choice or suggest better tech stacks.

Thanks in advance.

Socket.IO is great for building real-time systems like chat. It's effectively a nice wrapper around WebSockets, with the ability to fallback to other methods for browsers that don't support it. We just used it to implement real-time collaboration at BaseDash, including a chat system like you're looking to build.

Node.js is probably the correct choice, especially if you're already familiar with it You'll probably still need to build an API to send requests to your server, and then use Socket.IO to push messages to your clients. This will let you authenticate users and store messages on your database so you can retrieve them later. PostgreSQL and MongoDB are good options for your database, you should be fine either way. Don't worry about speed, they'll both be sufficient.

React on the front end makes it really simple to handle real-time updating data. Again, even better since you're already familiar.

I am interested in using a chat SDK for a community mobile Flutter app. I am between SendBird and Stream. I currently have 2,000 monthly active users and plan to have close to 5,000 active users chatting on the app. Has anyone used either and had good/bad experiences? Currently, there is no chat functionality, and we would like to have a 1-to-1 user chat, group chat, and large community chat capabilities.

I am considering which chat solution to choose between CometChat and SendBird, for our new app. The condition is, the app is going to run in a private network and has to connect with MSSQL. Any advice on other things I have to consider before choosing one, or is there another chat service you would recommend? Thank you!

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

Recently, the team at Stream published a React Native SDK for our new Chat by Stream product. React Native brings the power of JavaScript to the world of mobile development, making it easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. We decided to publish two different endpoints for the SDK – Expo and React Native (non-expo), to avoid the hurdle and setup of using the Expo library in React Native only projects on the consumer side.

The capability of style customization is one a large deal breaker for frontend SDKs. To solve this, we decided to use styled-components in our SDK, which makes it easy to add support for themes on top of our existing components. This practice reduces the maintenance effort for stylings of custom components and keeps the overall codebase clean.

For module bundling, we decided to go with Rollup.js instead of Webpack due to its simplicity and performance in the area of library/module providers. We are using Babel for transpiling code, enabling our team to use JavaScript's next-generation features. Additionally, we are using the React Styleguidist component documentation, which makes documenting the React Native code a breeze.

When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

To provide employees with the critical need of interactive querying, we’ve worked with Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine, over the years. Operating Presto at Pinterest’s scale has involved resolving quite a few challenges like, supporting deeply nested and huge thrift schemas, slow/ bad worker detection and remediation, auto-scaling cluster, graceful cluster shutdown and impersonation support for ldap authenticator.

Our infrastructure is built on top of Amazon EC2 and we leverage Amazon S3 for storing our data. This separates compute and storage layers, and allows multiple compute clusters to share the S3 data.

We have hundreds of petabytes of data and tens of thousands of Apache Hive tables. Our Presto clusters are comprised of a fleet of 450 r4.8xl EC2 instances. Presto clusters together have over 100 TBs of memory and 14K vcpu cores. Within Pinterest, we have close to more than 1,000 monthly active users (out of total 1,600+ Pinterest employees) using Presto, who run about 400K queries on these clusters per month.

Each query submitted to Presto cluster is logged to a Kafka topic via Singer. Singer is a logging agent built at Pinterest and we talked about it in a previous post. Each query is logged when it is submitted and when it finishes. When a Presto cluster crashes, we will have query submitted events without corresponding query finished events. These events enable us to capture the effect of cluster crashes over time.

Each Presto cluster at Pinterest has workers on a mix of dedicated AWS EC2 instances and Kubernetes pods. Kubernetes platform provides us with the capability to add and remove workers from a Presto cluster very quickly. The best-case latency on bringing up a new worker on Kubernetes is less than a minute. However, when the Kubernetes cluster itself is out of resources and needs to scale up, it can take up to ten minutes. Some other advantages of deploying on Kubernetes platform is that our Presto deployment becomes agnostic of cloud vendor, instance types, OS, etc.

#BigData #AWS #DataScience #DataEngineering

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

Your tech stack is solid for building a real-time messaging project.

React and React Native are excellent choices for the frontend, especially if you want to have both web and mobile versions of your application share code.

ExpressJS is an unopinionated framework that affords you the flexibility to use it's features at your term, which is a good start. However, I would recommend you explore Sails.js as well. Sails.js is built on top of Express.js and it provides additional features out of the box, especially the Websocket integration that your project requires.

Don't forget to set up Graphql codegen, this would improve your dev experience (Add Typescript, if you can too).

I don't know much about databases but you might want to consider using NO-SQL. I used Firebase real-time db and aws dynamo db on a few of my personal projects and I love they're easy to work with and offer more flexibility for a chat application.

Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.

We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.

We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.

What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.

Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...

Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.