Just a couple of days ago we finished our first round of improvements to GetStream.
A full range updates involved every aspect of our product; new APIs endpoint, better official clients, rewritten documentation, a new design and a more usable dashboard.
Design and usability improvements are the easiest to notice; our first good-enough-for-beta website and dashboard is now replaced by a world class design. The dashboard has also gone through a large overhaul. Common actions such as editing feeds and creating apps are now easier to reach.
A new Javascript Client joined our collection of official clients (PHP, Ruby and Python); the new client can be used both client side and server side (eg. NodeJS) and is published on NPM.
After listening to our users' most frequent questions, we rewrote most of our documentation; The documentation now shows examples for the Ruby, Node, Python and PHP clients (ready to be pasted in your editor)
We are also really proud to announce a long list of new features available from APIs:
Notification Feeds
We now support notification feeds. Notification feeds make it easy to integrate notification functionality into your app. They support aggregation, listening to changes in realtime and marking items as seen or read.
The foreign_id Field
You can now send a foreign_id when creating activities. This foreign id is a unique reference to the object in your database. Providing Stream with this foreign_id allows you to delete an activity using its foreign_id (removing the need to store the activity id) and helps us determine which activities are unique.
Uniqueness
It is now possible to have fine grained control over activity uniqueness constraints
Actor, Object and Target Strings
Are now stored as strings so you can easily use non integer primary keys (such as those generated by Mongodb)
Schema-less & Complex Custom Fields
Custom data can be sent to GetStream’s APIs directly; no need to create custom field anymore. Furthermore custom fields can hold not only raw strings but arrays and dictionaries.
The to Field
When creating activities you can now specify a to field. Feeds listed in the to field will receive the given notifications. This gives you more fine grained control over the fan-outs and is commonly used to support notification feeds or @mention functionality.
Followers and Following API Endpoints
You can query the APIs to retrieve the list of feeds following a feed and vice versa.
Batch Insert
Activities can now be inserted in batch. This makes it easier to import large amounts of activities.
That's All For Now
We believe this will help you building a better awesome social application in even less time than before! Try the getting started and see for yourself how easy it is to build newsfeeds that scale.
If you have any question about the new features please drop us a line at support@getstream.io