What is Pusher?
Pusher is a hosted API service that provides developers with the tools to easily build realtime features into their web and mobile applications. At its core, Pusher enables applications to communicate bidirectionally and establish persistent connections through which messages can be sent and received in real time.
Some of the key capabilities offered by Pusher include:
- Realtime messaging - Send and receive messages between clients and servers to enable features like chat, notifications, alerts, etc.
- Live updates - Stream live data and update clients in realtime as underlying data changes on the server.
- Collaboration tools - Enable clients to concurrently edit documents, update shared state, build multiplayer games.
- Presence information - Maintain visibility into who is online and connected to enable richer user experiences.
On the backend, Pusher abstracts away a lot of complex functionality that would otherwise have to be built and maintained. This includes managing connections, scaling to support a large number of concurrent users, maintaining high availability, providing strong security measures, and more.
As a hosted platform, developers can simply integrate the Pusher client libraries and API into their application. Without having to run their own realtime infrastructure, they can focus on building their application logic and providing great user experiences.
With customers like Skyscanner, BuzzFeed, Hearst Magazines and more, Pusher has established itself as a popular option for adding realtime functionality across industries and use cases.