Building a Realtime Task Management System

DropTask is a task management application designed to help individuals and teams be more productive and efficient. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and through a visual and engaging user interface, DropTask allows users to prioritize and delegate tasks to manage anything – from the day to day running of a business to a personal vacation.

Creating a collaborative environment

From the initial concept, realtime collaboration was a key requirement in the development of DropTask.  The ability to instantaneously update an entire team on the status or progress of a project was essential to the user experience. The development team quickly ruled out building their own realtime infrastructure.

“If we had developed even 10% of the real time services needed, it would have taken time, budget and resources away from building our own product. We needed a solution that was fast, reliable and available, whilst integrating quickly and easily into our product as we continued to develop for new devices and operating systems,” said Darren Rees, Head of Development at DropTask.

DropTask went with the PubNub Data Stream Network because of its unique ability to provide realtime state synchronization, as well as deliver the necessary performance and cross-device compatibility.

Simplifying development for greater customer experiences

DropTask users collaborate effectively and efficiently, with all changes and progress updates appearing in an instant to the rest of the team.

“It is fast. When you consider that the changes are made by one user with standard http, sent to the PubNub server and then reflected in what the entire team sees on their screens – it keeps everyone on the same page.”

From a development perspective, the integration of PubNub is simple and seamless. In addition to this ease of use, DropTask does not have to manage or resource any maintenance or security requirements.

“PubNub takes away a massive burden, we simply pull down the latest code and we don’t have to give it a thought, it just does its job.”

The application development continues to support more devices and operating systems. With access to a wide range of client libraries offered by PubNub, the development process is significantly streamlined. This allows DropTask to bring their products to market faster.

Focusing resources on the application

“The integration of real time is essential to DropTask. If we didn’t have PubNub, we would not have real time and the collaborative part of the application would not exist. It has saved us time and money and has enabled us to get our application to more users on more platforms. PubNub takes care of the real time infrastructure, whilst we focus our efforts on the development of the application and the needs of users.”