Real-time data streaming is essential for many time-sensitive apps that require quick processing of information. Even a minor delay for a few seconds can alter decisions or postpone the time span for meaningful actions. Consider a situation when someone steals and swipes your credit card, or triggers an offer when you are standing in the checkout line. Such situations require the early detection of fraud to minimize risks. Only by analyzing and combining real-time data, you can take appropriate action at the right time.
Many APIs and services can help to meet the increasing demand for real-time data streaming applications. Such solutions can help you stream real-time data to multiple clients or devices. Client-focused real-time services and APIs can work with a microservice or serverless backend to deliver real-time updates to any app.
Here are Some of the Best APIs and Technologies to Add Real-time Data Streaming to your Applications:
1. Apache Kafka
It is a popular distributed streaming platform that can be used for implementing real-time data-streaming apps and data pipelines. Some of the primary features that make it a perfect choice for implementing real-time data streaming include scalability, fault-tolerance, and speed of data processing.
You can use Apache Kafta to implement real-time data streaming pipelines to reliably exchange the data between applications and to develop real-time data streaming applications to interact with the streams of data.
2. Pubnub
It is a reliable platform to provide real-time services. You can use Pubnub for streaming updates to mobile, web, and IoT applications. It streams data using a publish/ subscribe model that utilizes pre-existing communication patterns of the browser. It has extensive SDKs and integration libraries to enable real-time data streaming for any stack.
3. Fanout/ Pushpin
It is a fantastic real-time API that allows you to push data instantly to any connected devices. It serves as a proxy and works with the backend language. For this reason, you do not require substantial reconfiguration in the inner-workings of your current API.
Unlike many other real-time data streaming providers, Fanout supports API development. It is ideal for developing advanced application controls. You can integrate Fanout with API management tools or use them to manage microservices.
An open-source version of Fanout is available by the name Pushpin. It is a proxy server that allows you to write the backend in any language. It is easy to integrate and works nicely with other languages or frameworks. Therefore, you can use Pushpin with any existing API management services.
4. Pusher
It streams data using a publish/ subscribe model. Pusher has over 30 libraries to ease integration. It has various developer-friendly features for access control and debugging. Unlike Pubnub, Pusher uses WebSockets.
5. Realtime Messaging by Realtime.co
It is a cloud-based message broker for building cross-platform apps requiring real-time communication. A quick-start guide is available for iOS, JavaScript, and Android, along with SDKs for all major platforms. Realtime Messaging supports auto-scaling features as well.
6. Streamdata.io
It is a SaaS API-based proxy tool to convert standard API requests and generate resulting streaming API. It acts as a streaming API by serving as a proxy for any HTTP API. In other words, Streamdata.io is a realtime cache proxy using which you can poll JSON REST APIs to push updates to connected clients. It maintains a history of any change modifications between pollings.
7. Layer
You can integrate real-time messaging in your apps by using the SDKs, APIs, and UI toolkits of Layer. It provides the necessary tools and managed infrastructure to easily integrate messaging services into the applications. The platform handles everything from servers and encryption to scaling and performance. Layer tools are HIPPA-compliant, support asynchronous, person-to-person messaging as well as business-to-consumer use cases.