Pub/Sub Channels
Pub/Sub Channels is Ably’s cloud-based pub/sub (publish/subscribe) platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product. It provides a set of consistent and idiomatic APIs across a variety of platforms for building realtime capabilities in applications including live data broadcast, push notifications, stream processing, and chat. With Channels, developers can build applications that communicate in realtime without needing to manage things such as scaling, latency, data integrity and network outages.
Features
Channels
The core building blocks of pub/sub. Publishers send messages to a channel and subscribers of that channel receive them.
Presence and occupancy
View information and metrics about clients that are attached to a channel, such as which other clients are currently “present” on the channel, or how many subscribers a channel has.
History
Retrieve messages that were previously sent on a channel to provide context to those who join a channel.
Integrations
Integrate with an external service to send all, or a subset of messages to your database, queue, Kafka topic, serverless function, or any custom HTTP endpoint.
Metadata
Provides insight into activity related to things such as connections, channels and API requests. Use this to indicate when the last subscriber has left a channel or check if there are any subscribers on a channel before publishing to it, for example.
Push notifications
Used to deliver native push notifications directly to iOS and Android devices, even when a device isn’t online or connected to Ably.
Getting started
Quickstart guide
Learn the basics of integrating Ably into your applications by running through the quickstart guide.
Examples
Tutorials
Create a pub/sub messaging app
Implementing token authentication
Persist messages into Amazon S3