Product Release: Events & Actions Free Preview

PubNub is proud to announce the release of the new Events & Actions feature. This feature will be available for free with limitations starting May 24, 2022 lasting until Aug 31, 2022.  You can find a getting started guide here if you’d like to dive in straight away, otherwise, here’s an overview of the feature and what things you can expect to accomplish with it.  

How does Events & Actions work?

Every time we interact with someone or something synchronously—such as ordering an Uber, turning on smart home lights, or chatting with a friend on social media—we’re utilizing a Virtual Space. 

These Virtual Spaces are made up of 4 key components:

• The Virtual Space itself

• Users that have a membership or subscription to the space - these can be people or devices

• Messaging - the way users communicate with each other

• Control - the rules of the space and what users are allowed to do in it

What are Events?

One of the ways users communicate with each other in this Virtual Space is with events. 

For example, say you have a simple chat application. A user joins a chat channel, sends a message, realizes they spelled a word wrong so they fix the message, and then finally they shut down the application.  

How many events happened? Five. 

1. The user connected to the network 

2. The user joined a space

3. Created a message

4. Updated that message

5. They disconnected from the network 

Every time these things happen, PubNub triggers an event and developers typically write application code to handle these events. This allows your users to engage and interact with other users in your Virtual Space.  This development model works really well, but can sometimes leave other stakeholders out of the loop. They may not know as much as they could about what their customers are doing in these Virtual Spaces, so there’s a need to expose more information about these events to non-technical stakeholders.

Enter Events & Actions—powerful event filtering with a simple UI to manage event listeners and associated actions. Events & Actions enables you to filter the meaningful events that are happening in your application and create corresponding actions that connect these events to the rest of your application infrastructure. PubNub’s new Events & Actions system can help you easily develop new, no-code features based upon events that occur in PubNub. 

Use Cases

The more you know about how your users are interacting in a Virtual Space, the more value you can deliver to them. 

Let’s take a closer look at a few ways you can leverage the Events & Actions system to identify the meaningful events that are happening in your application. 

Live events

Say you have a live event platform and you want to understand how your users felt about your last event. Based upon the things they said in the live event space or support chat space, you could set up a filter to listen for all message events in that space. You can then send them to an external application where you have the ability to search for keywords and perform analytics, such as sentiment analysis.

Geolocation

For a geolocation application, you are able to send data to an external system so you can analyze how your current route or pathing algorithm is working, or potentially use the data to train a new AI algorithm. 

IoT

Maybe you have smart sensors and you want to fan some of that data into a centralized database. You can set up a filter that triggers when specific metadata or messages are sent by the smart device, such as when temperatures get too cold if the device is a smart thermometer.

These are just a few of the ways you can utilize this system to capture events and data that are important to you. 

Check out our docs on Events & Actions here or log onto your admin portal to try it out and explore the possibilities.