Real-time messaging definition
Real-time messaging (RTM) or Real-Time Communication (RTC) enables the immediate exchange of messages with minimal latency, ensuring rapid data transfer and response. It often uses low-latency transport protocols like WebSockets, MQTT, or HTTP/2 with Server-Sent Events, maintaining a continuous connection between client and server. This setup is essential in applications where quick feedback is critical, such as collaborative tools, gaming, and IoT. RTM systems handle high-frequency, low-size message streams and require efficient routing, queuing, and delivery mechanisms to sustain high performance under load. A messaging API facilitates these interactions, providing the tools necessary to implement real-time communication in various applications.
Types of real time messages
Real-time messages can vary based on their purpose, content, and requirements for delivery and response time. Here are some main types:
Chat Messages: Text-based messages exchanged in real time, commonly seen in chat applications, support systems, and social media. These require low latency and can include emojis, images, and videos.
Notifications and Alerts: Immediate alerts sent to users or systems, such as breaking news updates, IoT device alerts, or critical system notifications. These need to be timely and reliable, especially in cases of emergency.
Command and Control Messages: Real-time instructions sent to devices or applications to execute a specific action, such as controlling IoT devices, sending game commands, or adjusting video quality during streaming.
Data Streams: Continuous data sent in real time, often in high volumes, like stock ticker price updates, GPS data, telemetry or sensor readings in IoT systems. These streams require constant transmission with minimal delay.
Multimedia Messages: Real-time transmission of audio, video, or images in applications such as video calls, live streaming, or collaborative video editing. These messages are bandwidth-intensive and require high synchronization for a seamless experience.
Real time messaging technology
Real-time messaging technology refers to the infrastructure, protocols, and software used to enable instant, low-latency communication between systems, devices, or users. It encompasses a range of tools and frameworks designed to establish continuous, bidirectional channels over which messages can flow with minimal delay. Core elements include:
Messaging Protocols: Technologies like WebSockets, MQTT, and XMPP allow for persistent connections, reducing the need for frequent reconnections and enhancing speed.
Scalability & Load Balancing: Real-time messaging platforms are architected to handle large volumes of concurrent connections, often leveraging load balancers and distributed cloud servers to scale efficiently.
Event-Driven Architecture: By processing data in real-time as events occur, this technology supports immediate data exchange, which is crucial for applications like financial trading, chat systems, and IoT sensor monitoring.
Delivery Assurance: Real-time messaging technologies often include features to ensure messages are delivered in order and without loss, even in high-demand environments.
Together, these components create an ecosystem for instant communication across diverse applications, from live customer support to collaborative workspaces and remote monitoring. A messaging API simplifies the integration of these technologies, providing developers with a framework to implement real-time interactions efficiently across various platforms.
Use cases
Real-time messaging tools power features like arenas for multiplayer games, audience-wide polls for virtual live events, and collaborative whiteboards for elearning platforms. In all these cases, real-time messaging protocols provide instantaneous and scalable communications between all users.
One of the strongest use-cases for real-time messaging is chat app. Chat apps inherently set out to connect the people that use them, and the immediacy of a live chat experience — ensured by real-time communication— is a crucial part of helping remote, text-based conversations feel like genuine interpersonal interactions.
How does real-time messaging work?
Real-time messaging is a highly versatile technology. This capability arises from two major factors:
Data is sent using flexible and resilient messaging patterns like publish/subscribe.
Messages themselves are packaged using common formats like JSON.
Additionally, APIs play a crucial role in real-time messaging by providing the necessary interface for developers to integrate these systems into applications. Messaging APIs abstract the complexity of underlying protocols and enable easy implementation of real-time messaging, allowing applications to send and receive messages efficiently, in real-time, without delays. PubNub APIs often support functionalities like event-driven interactions, reliable delivery (message guarantee), user presence detection, message serialization and more.
Fast and resilient messaging with publish/subscribe
Real-time messaging on the web typically involves a system in which data is streamed or pushed to users, applications, or devices with a low-latency, real-time delivery mechanism. PubNub, for example, implements a publish/subscribe (pub/sub) paradigm.
In pub/sub systems, data is published over a channel in the form of messages. Any connected device subscribed to that same channel will rapidly receive those messages as they’re published.
Package message data for easy consumption with JSON
Messages themselves are structured using a common and easily-read data format. PubNub uses JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). This means that messages can be unpacked and used by any recipient, be it a web, desktop, or mobile app, and without regard to the type of device that originally published the message.
Structuring and using real-time messages infrastructure
How a message is actually used across systems, servers, devices and platforms depends on the needs of the application. A chat app, for example, needs to display the messages that users send to one another, along with additional information like the name of each sender. Following this example, the original JSON payload could contain:
The name of the user that sent the chat
The chat message itself.
The time at which the message was sent.
Based on these contents and the channel on which the message was sent, a subscribed chat app would then be able to:
Populate the message body and sender name.
Find and display the sender’s profile picture based on the sender name.
Show the time at which the message was sent.
Display the completed chat message in the appropriate chat room.
With PubNub account, developers can integrate and customize the structure of communication channels and messages free for 14 days.
Real-time messaging vs webhooks: which works best?
Real-time messaging can be compared to webhooks, which push updates from an app to external URLs as events occur. Webhooks can invoke third-party services or trigger server actions in response to user activity, but they are limited to specific endpoints and aren't ideal for scenarios requiring communication among many participants, like chat.
In contrast, real-time messaging, such as that offered by PubNub, supports sending large volumes of messages to an unlimited number of participants. This pub/sub model decouples sending and receiving messages, allowing publishers to send without needing to specify recipients. This flexibility makes PubNub well-suited for various use cases where defining message recipients in advance is impractical.
How can I implement real-time messaging in my application?
When it comes to bringing real-time functionality into your app, you have a wide array of tools, technologies, and techniques to choose from. Whether you develop from the ground up or build on top of an existing messaging service, the route you choose will depend largely on your app’s needs, your timeline, the size of your engineering team, and your total development resources.
Option 1: Leverage web messaging protocols to build from scratch
On a basic level, real-time messaging patterns are enabled by a variety of web protocols that let devices freely stream packets of data to one another, without waiting for either party to explicitly request that information.
XMPP, WebSockets, and HTTP Long Polling are all good examples of real-time messaging protocols that support high customizability and extensibility, and that can serve as the foundation for a real-time application.
While open-source frameworks exist in many programming languages to support and use these messaging protocols, actually leveraging them as part of your tech stack means handling a much longer list of challenges, including:
Provisioning and hosting servers
Ensuring low latency for all users
Managing user connectivity, especially for mobile users that may be traversing networks
Designing the data structures for users, messages, and channels to work together flawlessly
Running and spinning up VMs as your service scales
Shared databases
Replication and POPs
Maintaining all of this into perpetuity
A dedicated development team can certainly build from the ground up. But, in reality, doing so is both an up-front and ongoing investment in time, effort, and resources. This means diverting from core development just to establish basic web messaging. The truth is, most teams looking to add real-time features need to do so without first needing to design, build, and maintain their own specialized infrastructure.
Option 2: Accelerate development with a real-time messaging API
A far better option for most teams will be to use a hosted, real time messaging API-based service that has already solved the major networking challenges across web, iOS, Android, and more. This drastically simplifies the development and deployment of new features.
An API-based service like PubNub brings all the power and flexibility of real-time messaging to your team with code-based tools. These let you build real-time functionality without worrying about infrastructure.
Hosted service providers like PubNub take care of major considerations like speed, scale, and reliability, as well as important but tricky details like connection management, data replication, and traversing complex network topologies. All of this lets your team focus less on simply keeping users connected, and more on the features they want to create.
Choosing a real-time messaging API
Any team looking to integrate real-time communication into their app via an API has many services to choose from. While each may appear to cover the same fundamental needs at a glance, evaluating a service in-depth can be a challenge. As you compare solutions, ask yourself questions like:
Is the API easy to implement?
Will this API let us easily add new features?
Does this API work seamlessly with the tools and technologies I already have?
Can this service deliver a reliably fast experience for my users?
Can this service support my traffic as I scale?
PubNub’s real-time communication platform offers easy-to-understand methods that let teams of all sizes leverage our globally distributed, scalable, low-latency network. Additionally, the flexible design of our APIs mean that any real-time feature can be built on PubNub, and our vast catalog of third-party integrations lets your team connect to the services they already love to use.
Consider the availability of real-time messaging SDKs
Additionally, consider the details of implementation. It’s essential that any API you choose works naturally within the technology stack your team has chosen. Here, SDKs come into play.
What is a real-time messaging SDK?
SDKs (software development kits) package all the power of a hosted real-time service into a set of intuitive methods for specific programming languages, making it easy for developers to build new features using the tools most familiar to them.
To empower dev teams and remove blockers, an API should offer SDKs for a broad range of platforms and languages.
Regardless of other messaging platforms you’re targeting, you’re likely to need a web-based version of your app. For developing web apps, it’s vital that a service offers Javascript and React SDKs.
For mobile apps, an API should offer:
React, or Dart + Flutter for hybrid development.
Android Java and Kotlin (Android), or Swift and Objective-C (iOS), for native mobile apps.
C# Unity for mobile games.
Finally, for server-side development, look for SDKs for Python, Java, C, Go, and node.js.
In the ideal case, a real-time API simply never makes you choose. PubNub offers the SDK for your platform, whether you’re developing for web, mobile, desktop, or IoT. This means that PubNub will work anywhere, using the most modern technologies available.
Beyond APIs, real-time chat platforms meet the real needs of app development
We mentioned earlier that chat apps are a common use case for real-time messaging, and it’s worth considering the challenges unique to developing these apps. Real-time and chat go together because the immediate exchange of messages is at the heart of any chat experience. But, instant messaging is only the first piece of a chat experience that will truly speak to the needs of users.
Thanks to the example of Slack, WhatsApp, and chat across the largest social media platforms, users now expect snappy and responsive messaging as a bare minimum. Realistically, they also expect to find polished, quality-of-life features that make a chat experience feel dynamic and responsive.
Crucially, if you are developing any kind of real-time chat, these features are an important part of engaging users and keeping them happy in your app.
To help your team deliver chat apps that can support those authentic interactions, a real-time messaging API should come as part of a mature and developed chat messaging platform, like PubNub. A messaging platform supports chat development by providing out-of-the-box features for:
Communication:
1:1 and Group chat, for all types of conversations
User presence, to see who’s online
Chat message history, to catch up on past or missed messages
The option to integrate voice and video chat, for genuine remote interactions
Expression:
Sharing GIFs in-line
Message reactions that keep conversations lively
Custom or unicode emoji support
Feedback:
In-app alerts for mentions and new messages
Typing indicators to create an instantaneous back-and-forth
Read receipts and timestamps so users know when others have seen their messages
Push notifications, so important updates don’t get overlooked
Chat platforms that offer this feature set, like PubNub Chat, make it easy to build a chat experience for your users that brings the best of consumer chat experiences right into your app.
Real-time messaging examples
For example, mobile game studio Pocket Gems found that in-the-moment camaraderie fuels player relationships and strengthens in-game communities.
For its virtual live events, LiveLike’s audience chat lets fans join in the crowd's energy for pivotal moments like celebrating a touchdown.
And, in sensitive use cases like telemedicine, the immediacy and authenticity of real-time chat drives positive care outcomes by creating a space for patients and doctors to share honest communication.
Final thoughts: Real time messaging
Real-time messaging enables users and devices to send, receive, and consume information instantly as events occur. Modern systems often use pub/sub messaging patterns and open data formats like JSON, allowing for diverse use cases with unlimited connected devices.
This technology powers digital experiences across industries, from healthcare to multiplayer games, mimicking the immediacy of in-person interactions. Teams aiming to build real-time experiences benefit from API-based services for custom features, while those focused on chat apps should seek real-time APIs from established chat platforms.
If you’re ready to develop real-time features, get in touch with our team. We’ll get you up and running, so you can start building today.
