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We all expect online experiences to happen in realtime. Messages should arrive instantly, dashboards should deliver business metrics as they happen, and live sports scores should broadcast to fans around the world in a blink. This expectation is even higher for chat, which is now embedded in everything from e-commerce platforms to online gaming. But building realtime chat requires some heavy lifting—especially if you’re starting from scratch.

Internet users increasingly expect their digital experiences to be realtime. To meet this growing expectation, augmenting digital products with realtime features is becoming a priority for many businesses. This is the first post in a multi-part series that looks at what it takes to build and deliver realtime experiences for end-users. This post covers the core capabilities you need to engineer realtime functionality.

You use realtime communication every day. It is the simultaneous exchange of information between a sender and a receiver with almost zero latency. Internet, landlines, mobile/cell phones, instant messaging (IM), internet relay chat, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and robotic telepresence are all examples of realtime communication systems. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a web based realtime chat app using Laravel, Ably and Vue.js.

The joke used to be that no piece of software was complete until it could send and receive email. Fast forward to today, replace email with realtime chat, and actually you might not be too far from the truth. Whether you’re delivering customer service, connecting community members, or helping colleagues communicate, realtime chat is quickly becoming a standard part of the web developer’s toolkit.

Live experiences are at the heart of the modern web. And delivering them to small audiences is relatively easy, thanks to protocols such as WebSockets. But there is a challenge. The difficulty involved in scaling WebSockets is non-linear. In other words, there comes a point where serving more clients demands significantly more complex architecture.

Billions of people rely on WhatsApp each day to communicate in realtime. Friends exchange memes, expats catch up with their families, businesses take bookings and run customer support, and teams ranging from emergency services to on-call engineers at tech companies even use WhatsApp as their primary communication tool. So when WhatsApp had an hours-long global outage on 25 October 2022, the world noticed.

In this post I'll explain how to use a cloud pubsub service such as Ably to visualize the progress of a serverless workflow in realtime. You'll learn.