What is Pusher?

Pusher is a cloud-based platform that is primarily used to add features related to real-time communication in a mobile or web application. It provides the tools with which developers can seamlessly establish and integrate real-time communication channels between clients. In this Answer, we will explore Pusher, its need, how it works, its products, and some of its features.

How does Pusher work?

Pusher works on subscribe and publish patterns. It has primarily 3 components:

1. Publisher: It is the user that triggers an event that is to be communicated to other users (subscribers).

2. Subscriber: It is the user that listens to the event/actions triggered by the publisher.

3. Channels: It is the pathway through which subscribers and publishers communicate. Publishers send a message through the channels, and the subscribers listen to the channels to receive the message.

When data is published to a channel by the publisher, the Pusher is responsible for sending data to all the subscribers listening to that channel with the help of web sockets. Now we will look into the products Pusher provides.

Pusher products

Pusher is a real-time communication service that provides two products:

1. Pusher channels: A real-time communication service to allow clients (publishers) and servers (subscribers) to interact in real-time.

2. Pusher beams: A service to send push notifications to mobile devices.

Using both of these products and integrating them into our mobile and web applications, we may easily enhance user experience and interaction by providing real-time communications and notifications.

Pusher features

Now we will be looking into some of the key features Pusher provides:

• Easy integration: Pusher provides libraries for various programming languages like Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, and GO that allow easy integration of Pusher.

• Real-time events: Pusher helps define creative, interactive, and real-time events that trigger real-time updates.

• Scalability: Pusher has a scalable infrastructure. It can dynamically upgrade and scale according to the increasing traffic.

• Security: Pusher focuses on transferring data securely. It provides end-to-end encryption and authentication mechanism to protect the data.

Conclusion

Pusher is easy to integrate and provides real-time communication capabilities to our application. This helps in enhancing user engagement and collaboration. Using Pusher, we can easily create interactive real-time experiences to engage users. Whether there are live chats, collaborative tools, or notifications, Pusher can be integrated to help developers implement real-time features without building infrastructure from scratch.