I have a concern about the capabilities of Kinvey for my app. The product I am prototyping requires me to be able to receive real-time data associated with many individual users from many endpoint devices and then display queried data online from those devices for a specified user in real-time. From what I can tell, there are two ways I can achieve this: (1) client-side JavaScript polling for updates to the dataset associated with a specified user, or (2) Business Logic. Solution (1) seems like it could be problematic for bandwidth use. I would like to use Solution (2) but I'm unclear on how I can build a server-side script to accomplish this sort of automatic real-time "push" operation on a per user basis.



I would like to stress the data is being sourced not from online, but instead from a physical device via Ethernet. Please help me to understand how Kinvey can be used to build my real-time application.

Hey Richard,

I think it depends on the use case. For example, we've had users that want to build a chat application, and ended up using the Google App Engine BL extension with the Channels API (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/channel/).

Can you tell me more about the use case?

Hi Caroline,



The Google App Engine (BL = Business Logic?) extension with Channels API looks interesting. (We are actually looking at the Amazon Kinesis platform as well as a future possibility.)



To clarify, we are basically implementing Internet of Things using sensor nodes connected to people's devices. Sensor data, such as temperature/humidity, will be transmitted either synchronously or in an event-driven fashion, responding to events we sense such as device Turn On/Turn Off. We want to stream this data in real-time to our backend and perform data analytics in the backend to discover patterns in the data and alert subscribers to occurrence of these patterns. There could be thousands of subscribers with maybe 5 sensor nodes assigned to each subscriber.



For this application, of what use is Kinvey to me when I could use some PaaS provided by GAE or AWS?

Hey Richard,

Good question! The value of any BaaS is in what you *don't* have to build because it's already built for you. Specifically for your use case, it sounds like you'd get the most value of online/offline caching (since mobile networks aren't always 100% reliable), the fact that your CDN is already implemented for you, auto-scaling is figured out... the list goes on. Hope that makes sense!