We've taken an existing game of Pong and created five instances of it, each using a different realtime backend, Ably, Pusher over Ably, PubNub over Ably, Pusher direct and PubNub direct. Judge for yourself how well the adapters work.

A blog post, from Ably's chairman, looking at how realtime experiences are part of the next wave of digital customer experiences, and why Ably Protocol Adapters are going to help our customers deliver these experiences on any device.

We currently support Ably's realtime and REST protocols, MQTT, SSE, and other proprietary realtime protocols. We also support two queueing protocols: AMQP and STOMP. gRPC is currently in development and we'll be adding support for this soon.

Consuming, processing and reacting to realtime data on your servers is not easy, especially if you consume data using the pub/sub pattern. Ably's Reactor service solves that problem by allowing you to consume data using traditional queueing protocols, stream data to your servers, or trigger code in real time as messages or events are published.

MQTT provides a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices, optimized for low-bandwidth or unreliable networks. MQTT libraries already exist for almost every IoT device around.

SSE is a lightweight, unidirectional protocol that allows for a request from a client to be held by a server, allowing it to push data to the client without further requests. SSE is widely supported across browsers and devices, so can often be used to stream data from Ably without installing any SDKs.