The pitfalls of realtime-ification

A presentation at RailsConf in in Portland, OR, USA by Vladimir Dementyev

Building realtime applications with Rails has become a no-brainer since Action Cable came around. With Hotwire, we don’t even need to leave the comfort zone of HTML and controllers to introduce live updates to a Rails app. Realtime-ification in every house!

Switching to realtime hides many pitfalls you’d better learn beforehand. How to broadcast personalized data? How not to miss updates during connection losses? Who’s online? Does it scale?

Let me dig into these problems and demonstrate how to resolve them for Action Cable and Hotwire.

Video