Tutorials (4)

Customer Support Live Chat with VanillaJS and Stream Chat

How much do you love when you can just jump on a company's website and chat with one of their representatives to take care of your business; no picking up the phone, no waiting days for an email back?? Customer support live chat is a critical tool for every forward-thinking business. In this tutorial, you’ll
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8 min read

Stream Flutter: Building a Social Network with Flutter (Series)

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers and chat with them. Stream's Activity Feed API and Chat API combined with Google's Flutter makes it straightforward to build
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1 min read

Stream Flutter: Building a Social Network with Flutter – Activity Feeds

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers. Stream's Activity Feed API combined with Google's Flutter makes it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction. All source
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9 min read

Stream Flutter: Building a Social Network with Flutter – Direct Messaging

In the second part of our series, we'll implement direct messaging between users by integrating the Stream Messaging Platform. This post assumes you've followed along with part 1. Leveraging our code from part 1, we'll modify the backend to generate a Stream Chat frontend token so we can do the rest of the work in
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9 min read

Stream Flutter: Building a Social Network with Flutter – Group Channels

In the third part of our series, we're building group chat into our social application. This allows users to chat with multiple people at the same time. We leverage Stream Chat to do the heavy lifting. This post assumes you've gone through part 1 and part 2. Using our code from part 2, we only
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9 min read

How to Create a Chat App with Angular

💡 There’s a newer version of this tutorial! Stream now offers a dedicated Angular Chat SDK, paired with a new official Angular Chat App Tutorial. The new SDK drastically simplifies the development process described below. You can still skim this post for inspiration, but please refer to the new resources linked above for consistently up-to-date
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4 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream - Part 8

This is the eighth installment of a tutorial series focused on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. In this article, we will be walking through how to retrieve information from the Stream API client-side using Javascript to make an infinite scroll feature for our collections and content. Be sure to check
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5 min read

Build a Chat Messaging Platform in PHP

Building a fully functional and scalable chat platform is time-consuming. Luckily, Stream can help you build one in minutes! In this tutorial, we are going to use the Stream API to build a chat messaging platform in PHP. Prerequisites To follow along with this tutorial, you need to have a basic understanding of PHP and
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5 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream - Part 7

This is the seventh installment of a tutorial series focused on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. In this article, we will continue to explore creating, updating, and deleting activities by adding content to collections, a group of URLs with available previews. Be sure to check out the Github repo to
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5 min read

Ephemeral Chat Messages

One increasingly common feature in chat apps is the ability to send self-destructing messages, also known as "ephemeral" messages. When this feature is enabled, the messaging system automatically erases the content minutes or seconds after the message is sent. This deletion is effective on all the devices that received the message, as well as on
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3 min read

Build a Mobile Twitch Clone

People long for connection, and technology has allowed us to connect with those who aren't physically near in increasingly many ways over the last few decades. With applications like text messaging, and then group messaging, with our music, photos and movies moving to the cloud, we've been able to share more and more across great
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4 min read

How to Display Web Chat Notifications

In any chat application, one of the most integral features is being able to notify users of new messages. While providing this feature comes with its own set of challenges (listeners, timing, notification types, keeping track of which messages are read, etc.), notifying users of unread messages doesn't have to be challenging. Among the many
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5 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream - Part 6

This is the sixth installment of a tutorial series focusing on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. In this post, we will be exploring how to create, update, and delete activities on Stream, as well as enrichment of feed activities. We are going to dive into creating our first user-created objects,
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7 min read

Building an Ionic Real-Time Chat App

Update: Here is an excellent post on the vision for 2020's tech trends in cloud computing between the CEO of Ionic, Max Lynch, and CEO of Stream, Thierry Schellenbach. There is a massive difference between platforms such as React Native and Flutter compared to Ionic. Ionic believes that the open technology that powers today’s web
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7 min read

Implement Stream Chat with Vanilla JS

In this post, we are going to implement a simple Group Chat application with Vanilla Javascript and Stream Chat! Stream Chat allows you to rapidly ship real-time messaging systems that are reliable and robust, without the overhead cost and time of managing the infrastructure by yourself. And it’s pretty easy to use... You’ll find out
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11 min read

Deploying a Node API to Docker & Kubernetes with a CRA Frontend

Creating an application is a lot of work! Deploying your application shouldn't be. Every developer has said at one time or another, "it works locally, but I can't get it to work on the server!"; it can take you hours, or even days, to figure out what went wrong and to put a fix in
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7 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream - Part 5

This is the fifth installment of a tutorial series focusing on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. In this article will go through setting up a customizable user profile page and an introduction to adding content in Stream, we’ll even toss in a brief section on making a testing module to
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7 min read

Send Chat Transcripts with Mailgun

Getting Started In any business interaction, it is vital to hold on to records of how you got to where you are. Not only can being able to reference previous transactions and interactions teach you about what you've done, it can help you make informed decisions about what you are going to do. With this
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5 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream - Part 4

This is the fourth installment of a tutorial series focusing on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. This is the second part of the User and Permissions set up. This article is going to cover setting up the views and forms to allow users to register, login, and logout, as well
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8 min read

Build a Chat App With Ionic 4

Ionic is an open-source framework that allows you to build and deploy apps that work across multiple platforms, such as iOS, Android, desktop, and the web as a Progressive Web App – all with the same code base. At first, Ionic was built to work with Angular, but with the release of Ionic 4, you
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5 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream – Part 3

This is the third installment of a tutorial series focusing on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. Originally, this article was going to cover the creation of the initial database models for your app, as well as handling registration/login and other convenience functions for users, but given the sheer amount of
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5 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream – Part 2

This is the second installment of a tutorial series focusing on how to create a full-stack application using Flask and Stream. This week we’re going to start digging into the actual construction of our app. In this article, I am going to guide you through setting up the initial files and structure, as well as
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6 min read

Series: Building a Social Network with Flask & Stream – Part 1

For the last little while, I’ve wanted to develop a new kind of social media site. Between the privacy issues, relentless ads, and the pervasiveness of bots on almost every service, I wanted to build something that would allow people to have a new source to discover the newest and most entertaining content and discuss
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3 min read

Processing Webhooks with Stream Chat, Lambda, and Node.js

In this tutorial, we will show you how to process webhooks to send a message to a Slack channel! Here at Stream, we are big fans of Chat. With our chat product, we offer a webhook so that you can relay data to an endpoint of your choice. Webhooks are an excellent way to make
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5 min read

Build a Chat App with Stream & Kong

Managing microservices manually can get very complicated and takes the focus away from business logic. API gateways help take care of the various collective management and housekeeping tasks necessary for running microservices. One of the most popular API gateways is Kong. As the illustration below shows, Kong takes care of the tedious tasks involved in
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5 min read

How to Efficiently Use Webhooks and Stream Chat

Unlike an API request that's triggered when a request is sent, a webhook gets triggered when certain events occur within the cycle of an application. For example, when a new message is added on Stream Chat, the message.new event sends a payload to the webhook endpoint containing data about the message that was just sent.
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4 min read

Deploying Stream Chat (React) to Netlify and Heroku

This article describes how you can build and deploy a React Chat application powered by Stream’s Chat API to Netlify and Heroku. In this case, the React app will be deployed on Netlify, while the accompanying Node server will be deployed to Heroku. At the end of this article, you’ll see just how easy it
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3 min read

Build a Customer Support Chat Bot with LUIS, React Hooks, Azure Serverless and Stream

Initial Thoughts This tutorial will teach you how to build your own customer support chat experience and create a serverless chatbot! The end result will look much like this: The customer-facing chat experience is shown on the left, and the screen on the right shows the interface for support agents. Here’s a GIF of the
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12 min read

Integrating the Web Notifications API With Stream Chat

Many applications today inform users about important messages related to their application by sending notifications – this can be via push or web. With a web notification, a user can click on the notification and instantly get back to the application to further act on that piece of content. For Stream Chat applications, one of
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3 min read

Deploy a Stream Chat API With ZEIT Now

Stream Chat provides a JS Chat SDK that you can use to build custom messaging solutions for your application. Requests from the SDK are authorized via an access token provided by a backend API. Due to the restriction of having to generate a JWT token on the backend, you will need an API that supports
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5 min read

Implementing React Hooks with Stream Chat

React hooks, released in February 2019, have huge benefits when implemented in your application. Whether you've used hooks before or are just learning, this post aims to show you just how simple it is to implement them with Stream Chat. The Basics Using hooks with Stream Chat is as simple as it sounds. Wherever you
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7 min read

Open Source REST API for Chat with Express, MongoDB, and Heroku

Overview Here at Stream, we’re known for our Feeds as a Service as well as our Chat as a Service product. Stream Chat was released out of beta late last year, and we’ve been receiving quite a few inquiries on how to structure a RESTful API to support the backend portion of chat. The backend
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3 min read

Securing a Chat App With React and Auth0

In this tutorial, we will build a chat application that’ll allow users to participate in a group discussion similar to how channels work in Slack. We’ll handle user authentication, and management using Auth0's Authentication-as-a-Service solution that allows developers to add authentication to any application without breaking a sweat easily. At the end of this article,
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7 min read

React: Conversational UI Chatbots

Conversational UI is a user interface that emulates a human to human conversation, while in reality, the human is interacting with a computer program. We’ve often seen this with the use of chatbots and voice assistants. Conversational UI that involves speaking allows you to interact with a voice assistant, while typing allows you to interact
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8 min read

Stream Flutter: Building a Social Network with Stream Activity Feeds and Flutter

In this post, we'll be creating a simple social network, called Stream Flutter, that allows a user to post messages to followers. The app will allow a user to post a message to their followers. Stream's Activity Feed API combined with Google's Flutter makes it straightforward to build this sort of complex interaction. All source
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9 min read

Adding User Interactivity to a Chatroom with Laravel, Vue.js and Stream Chat

In my last tutorial here, we created a chatroom application using Laravel, Vue.js, and Stream Chat. Although we only covered the basics of getting our chatroom up and running, Stream Chat offers a lot of other functionality. In this tutorial, we will explore some of those functionalities, and we’ll be adding them to our chatroom
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6 min read

Building Real-Time Live-Stream Chat With Wowza

Wowza provides users with the ability to stream live video. Trusted by over 24,000 organizations to power video streaming, they offer an extremely flexible platform that’s easy to use for even the most novice streamer. This post is still useful, but out of date. Stream now offers a Live Video Streaming API! My team at
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6 min read

Building an Encrypted, HIPAA Compliant Chatbot

As healthcare technology advances, secure real-time telemedicine communication is becoming increasingly crucial to any modern medical application. It's essential to provide the technology experiences customers expect while protecting their privacy and data, like through HIPAA compliant chat. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which aims to provide and maintain data privacy for
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11 min read

Tutorial: User Auth with Stream Chat & Feeds

A common point of interest when integrating Stream is how to authenticate users, in addition to generating a token for use on the frontend side of the application. Whether you’re using Stream for feeds or for chat, generating an auth token is actually rather simple, and it’s easy to accomplish in just a few lines
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2 min read

Build a Video Conferencing App Using Dolby Voxeet and Stream Chat

With the recent launch of Stream Chat, the team here has been working with vendors to add real-time chat and messaging to various platforms. We’ve had several requests for voice and video chat, and after looking around at the market, it was a clear choice to partner up with Voxeet (recently acquired by Dolby). The
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26 min read

HIPAA Compliant Chat: Build a Chat App!

As healthcare technology advances, more patients expect healthcare applications to provide secure real-time communication. This often requires patients to exchange their protected health information (PHI) over in-app chat messaging. To maintain your users’ trust—and to ensure their privacy and data are protected—you must consider HIPAA compliance when building a chat experience. Note: In addition to
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8 min read

Building a Chat Room with Laravel, and Vue.js

Being able to communicate with a group of people in real-time over chat is one of the most powerful features of modern messaging. Real-time messaging with groups of people can have live general discussions across the board as though it were a one-to-one chat, which makes sharing general information fast and easy. In this tutorial,
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7 min read

Filtering Profanity in Chat with React Native

Unfortunately, there will always be users who tend toward using profanity within chat. As a developer, there will be a time that will come when you need to moderate this type of behavior. There's simply no way you will be able to manually watch all of the chat rooms and ban users because of their
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10 min read

Tutorial: Build Customer Support Chat with Laravel, Vue and Stream

Quick and active customer service is an integral part of any company or organization, especially those that conduct most of their business online. Quality customer service goes beyond merely fielding comments and questions from customers. The types of interactions your team has with your clients have a direct impact on how your customers perceive, use,
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6 min read

Building an Ecommerce Chatbot with React Native and Dialogflow

Chatbots allows ecommerce sites to provide more to their customers without the need for human intervention. Conversational experience is a powerful way to sell more on your ecommerce site. With the popularity of Chatbots, different services which provides powerful bot builders to developers also became available. A few of the most popular ones include Dialogflow,
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20 min read

Building a Svelte Chat App with Stream

In this article, you’ll learn how to build a chat app with Stream Chat API and Svelte 3. I’ll demonstrate how to add users to the app, how to retrieve the message history and how to send and receive messages between users. Here’s a live demo of what we’ll be building: Prerequisites Before you proceed
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6 min read

Secure React Chat Messaging App with Auth0

Chat messaging is everywhere today. We can talk to customer support personnel through a web app that allows them to see our request and respond in real-time. We can interact with our friends and family, no matter where we are, through apps like WhatsApp and Facebook. There are multitudes of instant messaging apps, for many
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17 min read

Python Chat Tutorial with Django and React

This tutorial will explain how to build a chat application with Python, Django and React. Unlike other tutorials, I’m not using Python/Django for WebSocket connections. While doing so may seem cool from a tech perspective, it's pretty sluggish and expensive – especially if you have a halfway decent number of users. Languages such as C++,
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5 min read

Tutorial: Use Gifted Chat UI with React Native

Create a React Native Chat App with Gifted Chat
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13 min read

Create a Chat App with Vue.js and Stream

When building a chat application, your head tends to spin in terms of what functionality you need. When building in-house, this process can turn into a nightmare.Thankfully, there are companies out there such as Stream that provide chat as a service as an API. In this tutorial, we will explore how to build a real-time
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6 min read

Using Stream's Real-Time Messaging API with Amazon Translate

Is your chat going global? Worry less about the language barrier when you pair Amazon Translate with our real-time messaging API. When powering a chat product in a global environment, multilingual support should be top-of-mind. Doing so allows you to ensure that the communication barrier between yourself and the user on the other end is
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8 min read

Adding Chatbots to Your Stream Chat App Using Google’s Dialogflow

Most tasks are repetitive and time-consuming. What if we could use a bot to help in doing the tasks instead? This will hugely increase productivity. Chatbots are fantastic for this.  In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through steps to adding a chatbot to your Stream Chat app using Dialogflow and Vue. At the end of
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13 min read

React Native Chat App Tutorial

The other week, I set out to write a tutorial on how to integrate real-time Stream Chat in React Native. It wasn’t long before I started adding other dependencies such as Gifted Chat for the UI and Serverless for token generation server-side. I even had a bit of fun by integrating an autoresponder with facts
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0 min read

Android & iOS Push Notifications with Stream Chat and React Native

The Stream Chat API allows you to quickly and easily build powerful Android messaging applications and features — from a simple one to one messenger to building a full-scale Slack-like community. Stream Chat also supports Push Notifications out of the box and implementing them into your own React Native Chat app is a breeze. In this tutorial,
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7 min read

Integrating with Stream: Backend & Frontend Options

When we first built Stream, the platform was intended to be a pure back-end integration, allowing companies to build complex feed structures in a matter of minutes to hours rather than days or months. Since the inception of Stream, the platform has grown to be much more than a back-end solution; Stream now offers front-end
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4 min read

Aviato – A Prototype Built with Stream's React Native Components & Serverless on AWS

The Story Behind Aviato With our recent announcement about the React Native Components for activity feeds, we wanted to showcase them with a project that was not only functional but also fun to build. For those of you that haven’t seen HBO’s comedy sitcom Silicon Valley, Aviato is an application that is inspired by that
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9 min read

Using the Stream Real-Time Firehose with AWS SQS, Lambda, and SNS

Stream enables you to listen to fee changes in near real-time using SQS, webhooks or websockets. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to use AWS SQS & Lambda to respond to feed updates. While websockets are the preferred method to listen to changes, SQS notifications have a special spot in the feed infrastructure. Stream
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8 min read

Running PM2 & Node.js in Production Environments

At Stream, we build a lot of showcase and example applications to show off the awesome features that our service has to offer. For nearly all of our applications, we host them on an instance – usually DigitalOcean or AWS EC2. While maintaining your codebase and keeping it relevant is difficult, we’ve found that the
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4 min read

Create a scalable clone of Twitter with Django and Stream

In this tutorial, we will make a Twitter clone using Django and Stream, a hosted API for newsfeed development. By the end, you'll see how easy is to power your newsfeeds with Stream. For brevity, we leave out some basic Django-specific code and recommend referring to the Github project for the complete runnable source code.
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9 min read

5 Common Mistakes Integrating With Stream

Getting started and integrating with a technical solution, like the Stream activity feed API, can be exciting. Sometimes you just want to rip open the proverbial box and get started. When implementing a new API I rarely want to read pages and pages of (sometimes boring) documentation - so here’s your TL;DR version of the
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2 min read

3 Crucial Feed Features to Drive Engagement and Retention

These days, activity stream and feeds (ex. newsfeeds) are ubiquitous. The most obvious examples are the Twitters and Facebooks of the world, but feeds are also being adopted by companies such as Google and Amazon. We’ve even noticed that many companies are basing their entire application off of a dynamic feed structure, but don’t even
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3 min read

Experimenting with React Native & Expo's Audio API

Here at Stream, we’re all about exploring the latest trends around popular technologies. Doing so allows our team to better understand what is happening in the open-source community, a community that our company DNA is largely comprised of. Last year, Stream released the open-source project Winds, an aggregated and personalized RSS reader powered by Stream.
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2 min read

Android Example Photo Sharing App

Introduction We’re covering some “best practice” examples of how to set up a mobile application powered with Stream APIs. We’re happy to announce that after several weeks of development and testing that we have an Android example to share. As with all of our example code, the project is open sourced and available on GitHub.
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6 min read

Best Practices for Instagram-style Feeds

Introduction As part of our "best practices" series, we wanted to describe our best practices for setting up activity feeds for a simple photo sharing application. These feeds allow users to upload photos, follow other users, like photos, and see notification and aggregated feeds. Of course, how you use Stream depends greatly on the kind
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3 min read

Example Go service for a Photo-Sharing App

Introduction Many customers have asked our team to provide a “best practices” example of how we’d like to see a mobile application developed to utilize the power of Stream APIs. Since a mobile app would also need a backend API service with which to communicate, we also needed to develop a server-side application which we
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6 min read

Aggregated Feeds - Demystified

Our team has been hard at work to make aggregated feeds easier to use. This blog post will dive into more detail and help you get your aggregated feeds up and running. If you're looking for something more interactive, also check out this 5 minute interactive tutorial. When to Use Aggregated Feeds You should use
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3 min read

The Stream Firehose with SQS, Lambda, and Redis

Introduction As of late August, 2016, Stream has officially opened a Firehose to its real-time platform, allowing users to listen to all feed changes via Amazon SQS or webhooks. The Firehose is an addition to the existing websocket framework and was put in place to allow for speed improvements in applications where real-time aspects were
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6 min read

Build Scalable Newsfeeds with PHP 7 and Laravel - in 60 Minutes

With all the excitement around the release of PHP 7 - here at Stream we have decided to give our own PHP a refresher - from our client, example apps, and Laravel framework integration. Learn installing PHP 7, Laravel 5.2, Stream-Laravel, and create an example application.
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13 min read

13 Tips for a Highly Engaging News Feed

Getting the user experience right for a newsfeed is quite the challenge. Many apps end up showing completely irrelevant content to their users. Companies like Instagram, Quora, Etsy, Linkedin and Facebook have shown us a few tricks about providing an engaging newsfeed experience. At Stream, we’ve helped thousands of companies with their feeds. Every app
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7 min read

React & Redux Example App Tutorials

Learn React. Learn Redux. Do it while you create a scalable photo sharing app using services like Mapbox, Algolia, Keen, Stream, imgix, and DigitalOcean.
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2 min read

Designing an Activity Stream? Yeah, There's a W3C Spec For That

Did you know that there's a specification for activity streams? That's in it's second version, and handled by the W3C?
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4 min read

How To Build a Notification Feed using Stream

A quick how-to for building a notification feed using Stream.
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0 min read

Parse Cloud Code, EmberJS & GetStream.io

We have released a small example app, which shows you how to integrate GetStream.io with Parse cloud code.
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1 min read

Example App: Python & Django on Heroku

We are excited to announce the first of our GetStream example applications - Python/Django on Heroku.
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2 min read