Chat by Stream

On occasion, I like to set out and write tutorials around the technology that I’m currently working with. With Stream’s recent release of its Python SDK for Chat, I felt compelled to write up a tutorial that would be engaging to developers interested in building a chat application with Python .

Most of the time, my tutorials are rather short and straight forward; however, with the Python tutorial, I wanted to take it a step further and throw in some additional technology to make things fun.

I chose to use a combination of our Python Chat SDK, the Stream React Chat components and Django for handling backend auth.

It was a lot of fun and I’m very proud to say that the tutorial turned out well. If you’re interested in reading, you can find the full Python Chat tutorial over on Dev.to.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy the tutorial on building an app with Python and Chat by Stream !

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.