Most Reliable Real-time Communication Systems For your WEB Application

As Software engineers, we all have to face this at some time in our professional careers where we have to provide an appropriate solution to make transactional information into realtime or about to realtime.

Realtime solutions are mostly needed where data analysis is the primary purpose of the application or either management. We use many real-time systems in our daily life without recognition, like email management applications (Gmail, Outlook, etc).?

Where data refresh automatically or frequently if we think at a big scale this frequency of data can down any system up to some extent. So technology kicks in and give us more with less.?

TCP/IP

If you are a hardcore geek, you always fall in love with TCP/IP. But developing the same thing again and again for different solutions is not a solution at all. We always left something during the scaling of the solution. Dos attacks, lag time, IP protections and other security flaws are always there to tackle. No doubt TCP/IP is pure and clear, but the time, cost and effort make it the least priority solution now. As a beginner, it is still the best solution to get knowledge of two-way communication.

Firebase (Realtime-Database)

One of the popular opinions always remains around Firebase by Google. It is used at large in the mobile application at the initial stage of its release. After getting popular Firebase increased its circle of service and started supporting web applications at the front-end. But now Firebase is available for mostly backend systems also like node, c#, etc. Hence become popular among web applications for its real-time capabilities. Firebase is a no-SQL database structure, quite similar to mongo-DB. Where data is placed in the nodes inside nodes. You need to do some customizations, or self-made logic to enable real-time communication if you just want to communicate but do not want to store information, something like TCP/IP.

For an idea, you can hardcode a node and push data to the same child to update info. It will enable you to communicate on the same node as a TCP/IP connection with IP: Port.

But here IP: Port combination is Firebase node/node/data only.

Azure Service Bus

Quite a similar solution to Firebase, but by Microsoft. It does not contain a lot like Firebase but gives the most effective alternative of TCP/IP. Azure message service does not have any database structure to store information like Firebase. It just contains namespace (name of the queue) & topics (sub-queue). In most cases, the queue name is always known to communicate, it’s like all machines which want to communicate know the address of the queue from where they get messages and to where they send messages. This service is not free compared to Firebase for beginners but is near to be free as of very cheap in cost.

From the above image, you can clearly get an idea of how it works, just for info, the lines inside the queue image are representing the topics. If you want to send a message to a Class 1 student, then it means you are sending it to the Class 1 queue. If you want to send a message to Class 1's specific student then you are sending queue Class 1's specific topic.

Read more about Azure Service Bus

Just for knowledge, almost all the solutions which are giving real-time capabilities are actually based on either TCP/IP or sockets.

The conclusion is that based on your application stack you can use this solution, TCP/IP is a universal solution with any stack bounding. Firebase is bound to few technologies. Where Azure Service Bus is .NET Stack or well preferred by Microsoft guys. As for my preference, I will go with Azure Service Bus at first and then Firebase, but don't want to waste time manually writing TCP/IP in case I can get desired features from already built solutions.