Realtime Chat Apps: Really That Easy

It’s common for us to say how “easy” it is to use PubNub right out of the box. And we mean it. To put our money where our mouth is and prove that it’s not just marketing jargon, I talked with Aniways Tech Web Lead Daniel Kalman, who used PubNub to demo the Aniways product.

Aniways is a SDK for mobile and web chat applications that creates a smarter emoji/stickers experience. Aniways analyzes the text that a user types into a chat component, then suggests emojis to replace that word. For instance, if a user was to type “let’s go for coffee,” they’re then suggested with several options of coffee icons, which the user can press to replace the word. Aniways currently offers 1000 in-house created icons (some free and some paid, optional and fully customized for the app to decide), that are larger and more detailed than your standard iPhone or Android messaging emoji. Developers can also include a Aniways`s store in their chat app for monetization, allowing users to buy emojis.

Check out Aniways in action below, or take a look at this video to see how the SDK works:

It was safe to say that PubNub lived up to its “easy to integrate” tag. In under 20 minutes, the Aniways team had the Aniways demo up and running, integrated with PubNub based mainly on the PubNub Messenger demo. Aniways easily hooked up their product to the key junctions of the PubNub messenger demo, such as sending text, rendering the messaging icons, and the text box. Aniways`s SDK is really easy and fast to implement in any app.

“I grabbed the PubNub messenger from the PubNub Messenger blog post, and in about 10 or 20 minutes of work, I had integrated Aniways and was up and running. Using PubNub was great since it took care of all the chat framework and realtime messaging. We didn’t have to worry about any of the realtime functionality. I could just use it out of the box along with the blog post and it worked great,” said Kalman.

Additional PubNub Chat Resources

As exemplified by Aniways, building and modifying fully featured realtime chat applications with PubNub is easy:

• Data Streams: PubNub Data Streams enables you to send and receive messages in a quarter of a second.
• Presence: Presence shows which users are online, and which ones aren’t (like an AOL buddy list).
• Storage & Playback: Stores, retrieves, and publishes previous messages sent.
• PubNub Access Manager: Allows you to grant and revoke access to users to single chat channel

More About the Aniways SDK

• User personalization analysis learns what emojis the user prefers in the app and offers automatically relevant emojis.
• The Aniways in-house design team can create customized emoticon packs for the app with their logo & brand to increase brand awareness within the app.