Introducing real-time streaming apps in Superblocks

In today's intensely competitive business environment, businesses must swiftly address ever-changing market demands with immediate, data-driven insights. Data streaming technologies like Kafka, Kinesis, and Confluent enable businesses to achieve unparalleled processing speeds and deliver exceptional customer experiences with the freshest data. Streaming has also emerged as the predominant paradigm across leading generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Bard. As a result, streaming is increasingly critical to enterprises - according to Confluent’s 2023 Data Streaming Report, 72% of IT leaders utilize data streaming for vital applications, realizing up to a 10x ROI.

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Harnessing the power of streaming has historically come with significant developer complexity. To build streaming apps, developers had to grasp novel concepts, standards, and protocols like timely processing, ordering guarantees, WebSockets, HTTP2, and Server-Sent Events. Building streaming UIs required clever memory management for high data volumes and graceful handling of incremental data and connection issues. Additionally, there is no standard interface, terminology, or integration pattern across streaming platforms, increasing switching costs and lengthening time-to-value when selecting or changing streaming technologies. 

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Today, we’re thrilled to unveil real-time streaming apps in Superblocks, making it simple for any developer to harness the power of streaming without expertise. With Superblocks, developers can connect to any streaming platform, use the native Stream and Send blocks to consume, process, and produce messages, and connect high volumes of streaming data seamlessly to Superblocks Components. Businesses no longer need to shoulder excessive costs, time, and maintenance burdens to capitalize on the power of streaming. 

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Now, businesses can seamlessly build mission-critical tools where speed is paramount, such as real-time fraud detection in banking, live order tracking in e-commerce, continuous network monitoring in telecommunications, live gameplay events in gaming, and real-time supply chain monitoring in manufacturing. 

Surface real-time insights effortlessly

Building streaming UIs in Superblocks is simple. Developers write the messages produced by a Streaming API to a front-end state variable and bind components to this data via the properties panel. Superblocks components handle streaming data out-of-the-box, so surfacing real-time data is effortless. 

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Developers can also stream messages to the front-end for non-streaming data sources using the Send block, making it simple to surface incremental data from intensive backend operations for a superior UX. 

Transform data in motion

In Superblocks, transforming data in motion is just as simple as building any backend business logic with the visual builder. Since Stream and Send are just Control Blocks, developers can visually build the logic to consume a message, process it with logical Control Blocks, integrations, and code steps, and then produce messages to the front-end or to another stream. 

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As a result, developers can visually build event-driven apps for use cases like live trading data, real-time analytics, monitoring, and alerting, IoT data processing, supply chain optimization, patient monitoring, and more. 

Stream AI-generated responses 

Leading generative AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Bard stream incremental responses in real-time rather than make users wait for a full reply. These platforms’ streaming APIs allow developers to reuse this pattern in custom apps for optimal UX. 

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Superblocks developers can easily build best-in-class generative AI-based chat, analysis, and content generation tools with streamed responses. For example, building a bespoke ChatGPT-style AI chatbot is as simple as dragging on the native Chat component, sending user messages through a Streaming API with the native OpenAI integration, and streaming the response back to the front-end. 

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Connect to any streaming platform

With Superblocks, there’s no need to worry about the unique interface of each streaming platform. Developers can simply set up their integration credentials, then start consuming from and producing to platforms like Kafka, Confluent, Kinesis, OpenAI, Google Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, Redpanda, Redis Streams, AWS SNS & SQS, Azure Event Hub, Databricks, Apache Pulsar, Rockset, MongoDB, and more.  

Build powerful streaming apps without the expertise

Real-time streaming apps in Superblocks empower stakeholders across the enterprise to operationalize streaming data more efficiently.

• CTOs and Data Leaders can extract greater value from investments in modern streaming technologies faster at a lower cost, as their teams develop more streaming apps at a higher velocity
• Developers are empowered to build streaming apps without expertise, broadening the skillset of developers across organizations
• Business users get access to real-time insights within internal tools, enabling them to make more informed decisions and provide a superior customer experience