Phil Leggetter

Head of Developer Experience & Relations at Hookdeck

Real-Time Web Technologies Guide

Note: This page is a work in progress. I plan to update it with new technologies as I find them and increase the information on each as I find the time. If you know of a technology that should be included in this guide then please raise a pull request. If you have any questions please drop me an email.

As above, you can contribute to the list by making a pull request to the Realtime Web Technologies Guide github repo.

Hosted Realtime Services

General Messaging & PubSub

Ably

Ably.io logo

Ably is a platform that makes it easy for you add realtime messaging and streaming data to your application. The global service is uniquely able to offer solutions to the most difficult aspects of messaging at scale such as limitless scale, connection state recovery, guaranteed message delivery, client library “intelligence” to work around transient network problems. The Ably service operates in more than 24 data centres globally offering the lowest latencies globally.

See the complete feature set.

Fanout (now part of Fastly)

Build and scale realtime APIs. Fanout’s push CDN makes it easy. Add live updates to your websites and web services using REST, HTTP streaming, WebSockets, Webhooks, and XMPP

For front-end applications, Fanout’s JavaScript library receives realtime JSON notifications with just a few lines of code. Integration is quick and simple.

For services and APIs, you can add realtime functionality with minimal modification. By acting as a reverse proxy, Fanout’s global cloud invisibly bridges realtime clients with the services you’ve already built.

Hydna (no longer available)

A scalable real-time platform

Hydna is a hosted backend into which you can send data and have it instantly appear on other devices.

Instantly move data across platforms, technologies, and devices

Hydna is ideal for building dashboards, activity streams, notification- and chat systems, real-time collaboration, live statistics, remote controls, multiplayer games, and more.

PubNub

Pubnub is the fastest cloud-hosted realtime messaging system for web and mobile apps.

Pusher

Pusher Logo

Pusher is a hosted API for quickly, easily and securely adding scalable realtime functionality to web and mobile apps.

Realtime.co (no longer available)

Realtime

The Realtime Messaging Framework is a cloud-hosted messaging system for websites and mobile apps that require constant content updates in just a few milliseconds, enabling any application to interact with millions of connected users in a fast and secure way.

Diffusion by DiffusionData

Diffusion (formerly Reappt, from Push Technology — now DiffusionData) is a real-time data platform that handles low-latency streaming and secure distribution of data at scale. Available as a fully managed cloud service, on-premise, or hybrid, with delta streaming to reduce bandwidth and SDKs for JavaScript, Java, .NET, Python, iOS, Android, and C.

Streamdata.io (acquired by Axway)

Streamdata.io is a real-time cache proxy allowing you to poll JSON REST APIs and push updates to clients. But wait, there is more: Streamdata.io keeps a history of modifications that occur on the data between two pollings! This way, streamdata.io is able to give you the list of modifications which happened since last time you fetched the data.

Tambur.io (no longer available)

Tambur.io provides your business with a simple messaging API to build scalable realtime web and mobile apps.

WebSync on-demand (by FrozenMountain) (no longer available)

Data Synchronisation, Persistence, Full Stack

CloudBoost (hosted service discontinued; open source on GitHub)

Convergence

Convergence Logo

Convergence is the world’s first API specifically designed for realtime collaborative applications. It was created as a one-stop shop for realtime collaborative application development, with a rich JSON-inspired data model API, guaranteed conflict resolution, and first-class APIs for users, presence, chat, and collaboration awareness.

Firebase

A scalable real-time backend for your web app. Build apps really fast without the hassle of managing servers

Acquired by Google. Still active.

Google Drive Realtime API (retired by Google in 2019)

Add Realtime collaboration to your app Give your users the power of Google Docs–style collaboration. All JavaScript. No server. No sweat.

Meteor

Meteor is a set of new technologies for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you’re an expert developer or just getting started.

Not to be confused with the original Meteor Comet server

Realtime.co Cloud Storage (no longer available)

The Realtime.co Cloud Storage is a highly-scalable backend-as-a-service based on Amazon DynamoDB. Built-in real-time notifications keep data synchronized between users (web and mobile).

simperium

Simperium is a service for developers to move data everywhere it’s needed, instantly and automatically.

Messaging: with focus on delivery to servers

Superfeedr

DataSift (acquired by Meltwater)

Other

Echo (no longer available)

Self Hosted Realtime Solutions

apache-websocket

WebSocket module for Apache

APE Project

Alchemy Websockets

An extremely efficient C# WebSocket server for .NET projects.

ArduinoWebsocketServer

This library implements a Websocket server running on an Arduino

Atmosphere

Autobahn WebSocket

Autobahn provides Open-Source client and server implementations of WebSocket and WAMP.

Beacon Push (no longer available)

BrainSocket (no longer available)

A Laravel package that allows you to get up and running with real-time event-driven PHP apps using WebSockets.

Caplin System’s Liberator

Centrifugo

Real-time messaging server in Go language. This is a successor of Centrifuge. Server has simple API to publish messages into channels, provides presence and history information and more. Javascript client available to communicate from web browser. See full documentation on gitbooks.io.

cometD

Cowboy

Cramp (no longer available)

Deepstream.io

Deepstream.io is a fast and easy to use realtime server written in node. It offers persistant data structures, RPC and PubSub messaging that works on both client and server. Deepstream can connect to a variety of caches and databases and scales horizontally across multiple servers.

em-websocket

EventMachine based, async, Ruby WebSocket server.

Emitter

Emitter Logo

Emitter is a free open source real-time messaging service that connects all devices. This publish-subscribe messaging API is built for speed and security.

erlang_websocket

erlycomet

FAYE

Firehose.io

Firehose is a minimally invasive way of building realtime web apps without complex protocols or rewriting your app from scratch. Its a dirt simple pub/sub server that keeps client-side Javascript models in synch with the server code via WebSockets or HTTP long polling.

Fleck

Fleck is a WebSocket server implementation in C#. Fleck requires no inheritance, container, or additional references.

Garufa

Garufa is an open source Ruby WebSocket server which implements the Pusher protocol. It is built on top of Goliath, a high performance non-blocking web server, and inspired by Slanger, another server compatible with Pusher.

Goliath

ICEfaces

Java-WebSocket

This repository contains a barebones WebSocket server and client implementation written in 100% Java. The underlying classes are implemented using the Java ServerSocketChannel and SocketChannel classes, which allows for a non-blocking event-driven model (similar to the WebSocket API for web browsers).

Jetty

juggernaut deprecated

jwebsocket

Kaazing

libwebsockets

C Websockets Server Library

LightStreamer

Meteor Comet server (no longer available)

Migratory (now MigratoryData)

misultin

Mojolicious

A modern Perl web framework built from the ground-up as a nonblocking web server, including built-in support for web sockets.

nowjs

Doesn’t appear to be actively maintained any more and the website is down.

Nugget (no longer available)

A web socket server implemented in c#.

The goal of the projects is to create an easy way to start using HTML5 web sockets in .NET web applications.

phpDaemon

Asynchronous server-side framework for Web and network applications implemented in PHP using libevent. phpDaemon can handle thousands of simultaneous connections

PHP WebSocket

Persevere (no longer available)

Plezi

Plezi is an easy to use Ruby Websocket Framework, with RESTful routing support and an MVC supportive design. It can also be used as middleware in other Rack frameworks (i.e. Rails / Sinatra apps). It’s name comes from the word “fun” in Haitian, since Plezi is really fun to work with and it keeps our code clean and streamlined.

Pokein (no longer available)

Prosody

Prosody is a modern flexible communications server for Jabber/XMPP written in Lua. It aims to be easy to set up and configure, and light on resources. For developers it aims to be easy to extend and give a flexible system on which to rapidly develop added functionality, or prototype new protocols.

Ratchet

A PHP 5.3 (PSR-0 compliant) component library for serving/consuming sockets and building socket based applications. Build up your application (like Lego!) through simple interfaces using the decorator and command patterns. Re-use your application without changing any of its code just by wrapping it in a different protocol.

RethinkDB

RethinkDB is the first open-source scalable database built for realtime applications. It exposes a new database access model — instead of polling for changes, the developer can tell the database to continuously push updated query results to applications in realtime. RethinkDB allows developers to build scalable realtime apps in a fraction of the time with less effort.

SignalR

Slanger

Slanger is an open source server implementation of the Pusher protocol written in Ruby.

socket.io

Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms. It’s care-free realtime 100% in JavaScript.

SockJS

SockJS is a browser JavaScript library that provides a WebSocket-like object. SockJS gives you a coherent, cross-browser, Javascript API which creates a low latency, full duplex, cross-domain communication channel between the browser and the web server.

SocketCluster

A highly scalable realtime environment for Node.js SocketCluster is a new kind of engine which sits between Node.js and your code to provide you with a resilient, scalable, realtime architecture.

With SC, you can build systems that make use of all CPU cores on a machine/instance. This removes the limitations of having to run your Node.js code as a single thread.

SC also gives you the flexibility to scale up and scale out easily and at your own pace.

SocketTornad.IO (no longer available)

Implementation of the Socket.IO Websocket emulation protocol in Python on top of the non-blocking Tornado Web Framework.

Spike-Engine (no longer available)

Spike-Engine allows quick and painless creation of real-time web services in .NET. Spike-Engine focuses on latency, bandwith and perfomance and has been designed and proven to be robust and reliable. The technology has been tested in production environment with thousands of simultaneous connections and used to build reliable game and application servers.

StreamHub (no longer available)

SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket server

Thunder Push

Thunderpush is a Tornado and SockJS based push service. It provides a Beaconpush (beaconpush.com) inspired HTTP API and client.

Tornado

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Represents a core building block of many other realtime web servers.

UnderTow

An asynchronous WebSocket and HTTP server in Java

webbit

An event-based WebSocket and HTTP server in Java

WebSockets and Joomla

ws4py

XSockets (no longer available)

YAWS (Yet Another Web Server)

WebSocket Client Libraries

JavaScript - Flash Socket Fallback

ActionScript

.NET

Silverlight

Java

C++

Ruby

Python

Objective-C