Chat Applications with Cloud Firestore
Join room
We can successfully build a real-time chat application with Next.js using Socket.IO. The real-time communication however was found not to function well once the package is deployed to Vercel, which is a serverless platform. It is suggested by Vercel two main approaches to applying a real-time model to stateless serverless functions.
- Serverless Functions have maximum execution limits and should respond as quickly as possible. They should not subscribe to data events. Instead, we need a client that subscribes to data events (such as Alby, Pusher, etc.) and a serverless function that publishes new data.
- Rather than pushing data, we can fetch real-time data on-demand. For example, the Vercel dashboard delivers realtime updates using SWR.