High-performance messaging service for PaaS and web applications
Today we live in a fast-paced world. The ability to monitor and timely react to important events is crucial. Implementing those capabilities for your business/web applications can be truly challenging, especially when you develop applications on PaaS platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce and Appian.
Just take a very simple use-case that all of us facing every day — an important event occurs (security alert, critical approval request etc.) and we need immediately display in-app notification for online users:
Well, this kind of interactive real-time communication simply not supported by some of the PaaS platforms and web applications. That is because it requires a specific technical capability when a client (browser) keeps a persistent connection with a server and listens to server-sent events.
We’ve built that capability for ServiceNow platform about a year ago, and today we re-invented it to make it much more scalable, powerful, and cloud platform independent:
- It works with any PaaS (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Appian etc.) and web applications
- 10K online concurrent users and thousands of messages supported out of the box
- Integration can be complete in 2 minutes
More details you can find at https://buzzpost.io, and below I will show how easily you can integrate in-app messaging service into your application.
How it works
buzzPost is a messaging hub that routes real-time messages within one or across multiple systems and applications.
Online users (clients) subscribe and listen to particular channels where publishers post messages:
It may be used just for one single app/system, where online users (web clients) will be listening for its server-sent messages(events):
The service can also route messages across multiple platforms and apps, e.g. online ServiceNow users can subscribe for real-time events from other web apps and external systems:
Integration (2 minutes)
It is literally that simple.
All you need is to have access to a message broker — a server, which routes your messages to connected online users. We try to keep a few public servers up and running for testing and demo purposes, so all of the examples with hub11.dev-labs.io should still work if you try them in your app/browser.
Step #1 — subscribe to a channel
Clients (web browsers) can subscribe using standard browser EventSource API. You just need to provide a broker server name (e.g. hub11.dev-labs.io) and a comma separate list of channels to subscribe.
Add the following javascript code somewhere in your app — when a web browser loads the code it will start listening for incoming messages on the corresponding channels:
Step #2 — send messages
The cool thing: messages can be sent from anywhere. It might be PaaS, another web app or any other third-party system.
To send a message you just need to send a POST http request to a message broker server with the following JSON payload:
Here is an example that sends “Hello world!” on “alfa” channel (Postman):
This is the code to send a message from a web browser:
Here is a curl code you can run in terminal:
Security
There are multiple authentication options supported:
- API keys — out-of-the-box option, secures subscribe/post communications.
- CORS rules
- on-prem installation
- private VPC
- etc.
All examples from above do not have any security in place since hub11.dev-labs.io is a public message broker server. Production and private test/development instances have API keys security enforced.
That was just the first glance at buzzpost.io. In the next post, I’ll show how to integrate it with ServiceNow in just a few lines of code.
