What the heck is a realtime app?

Joe Hanson Content Marketing @ PubNub

At the core, realtime technology is the publishing (sending) and subscribing (receiving) of data “as it happens,” in real life.

Information and data is sent and presented in milliseconds.

What is realtime?

What are some examples?

When someone sends you a message in a chat app, and you receive that message on your phone, or you get a push notification, that notification or message

is received in realtime.

When you watch your taxi moving on a map on your phone, and it smoothly moves along the street

towards you, the map and taxi location is updating in realtime.

In a multiplayer game, when two players move their characters, player position is updated on both

browsers in realtime.

When you click a button on your phone to change channels on your TV, that signal is sent in realtime.

When you’re walking to your house, and your lights turn on based on your geolocation, that signal is

sent in realtime.

How is this possible?

To make realtime happen, devices are sending little tiny packets of data to one another (bi-directionally) in under a 1/4 second.

That sub-1/4 is considered ‘realtime’ speed.

Publish

Subcribe

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StreamNetwork

This doesn’t just magically happen.

The app developer needs a realtime data stream network to send those little tiny packets of data.

Building a ‘realtime’ infrastructure yourself is hard, can get expensive, and is a large burden on development time. And once it’s built, you then have to maintain and scale that network.

Data Stream Networks

This is often why many of our customers often go through a build vs buy stage, and soon realize that building it themselves isn’t plausible.

Developers will first try to build realtime into their application with an open source protocol, but soon find it’s expensive, time consuming, and tough to scale.

Hence why developers build realtime on a data stream

network.

So app developers use our data stream network, which we’ve built and globally scaled for the developer.

This saves them time and money (they don’t have to build it themselves, we did it for them).

Businesses like PubNub are known as many things: IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), data streaming services, realtime data stream networks, realtime networks, etc.

The value to the developer is that they can use our infrastructure (our network) so that they can focus on their apps.

The infrastructure is made up of multiple data centers (massive server rooms spread across the globe) that move (aka, ‘stream’) these small packets of data.

This type of infrastructure is called a realtime Data Stream Network. And that’s what we do at PubNub.

Realtime data streaming is changing the way we build web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications.

And to mimic real world interaction, the web is being pushed from static to realtime.

Static Web

Realtime Web

Now that you understand what PubNub does, check out the PubNub Use Cases page, and see some real world examples of realtime technology in use.

Or if you want to get started right away, sign up for a free account and head over to our short Quick Start Tutorial to get going.

Getting Started