Tambur.io provides your business with APIs to build scalable real time web apps | Hacker News Reader

Tambur.io provides your business with APIs to build scalable real time web apps

tambur.io

33 pointslest33 comments

Looks nice, but what's the difference between Tambur.io and:

• http://www.buddy.com/ • http://js.dotcloud.com/ • https://cloudmine.me/ • http://backlift.github.com/docs/ • http://www.meteor.com/main • https://parse.com/about/index • http://derbyjs.com/ • http://www.kinvey.com/ • http://www.stackmob.com/ • http://www.appcelerator.com/cloud • http://pusher.com/ • http://www.firebase.com/ • http://www.pubnub.com/ • https://www.getbridge.com/

This is an important question I think should be answered

Well, I can't describe all the services you listed - we didn't even know all of them. We started by really focusing on websockets, not mobile cloud or mobile app backend, but I'm not denying there is similarity to other push services (hope they have tons of customers :)

>We started by really focusing on websockets

Don't focus on the underlying tech, especially in your marketing material. Your users don't (and shouldn't) care. Devs who are going to use your product, won't be using web-sockets (and in fact, your library has fallback to flash sockets so in fact they may not), they'll be using your library, and if your library, works and gives them good performance, does it matter if underneath it uses, flash sockets or web-sockets or comet or ajax or a combination of all or black magic?

>We started by really focusing on websockets, not mobile cloud or mobile app backend.

So is there any reason why someone would choose you guys over the others (most of whom support Web and Mobile clients)?

Even if the market is there & competition is good: You are right, tough question, because from a marketing angle this IS a black magic perspective. Def. need to work on differentiation, clearer value proposition etc. & not switching instantly to tech explanation or mentioning future plans and additions [which we have].

So…choose Tambur to make us learn more… ;) it IS a learning experience & we are thankful for all comments here

Tambur.io started as a weekend project 10 months ago and now faces the (hackernews) crowd

I love the info bar in the middle of the site; the design is very pretty!

I'd like more information (maybe code examples?) when I click on the sections (Publish/Subscribe, Direct Messaging, etc.) without having to sign up. Right now, you're asking me to create an account without having a terribly clear idea of what I am actually signing up to.

(actually, I just realised that you have a 'how it works' section...that should be easier to find, I think! It is more or less exactly what I want when I try clicking on your 'publish/subscribe' section on the info bar.)

Good luck with your site!

thanks for your feedback.. we really appreciate it!

It's nice to see someone using Zurb Foundation for a change ;)

haha indeed, that's the hidden reason why we switched from a first bootstrap version to foundation.

It looks really nice, I think I'll try and sneak this into my new portfolio website for an experiment. Thanks for posting and good luck!

Thanks for the comment! every feedback is very much appreciated!

Does this have any special features compared to pusher, pubnub, etc.?

Maybe not important for everyone, but tambur supports SSL for all pricing plans.

As pusher we are big fans of WebSockets, afaik pubnub uses some sort of long-polling for their message-handling. I am not sure if pubnub provides a way to trigger presence events. Pusher also provides these features afaik by using separate channels for e.g. presence events (not sure though). In Tambur you enable presence-events, direct- and authenticated messages on the same channel (we call them streams). So we probably have more in common with pusher than with pubnub feature-wise, we just do things a little bit differently.

Maybe not important for everyone, but tambur supports SSL for all pricing plans

Well it's won you one customer here at least. I'm really sick of companies charging extra for security.

wow, that's great to know! let us know if we can help you to get started with your apps!

Tambur.io looks great.

Another alternative if someone is looking for hosted SSL on a free plan would be Buddy http://www.buddy.com/pricing/, free for the first half million API calls with unlimited applications. Pretty steep at $250/mo for 500,001-10MM calls.

we didn't know about buddy.com, but it is good to see a trend towards 'security included' ;)

SSL is certainly important for a lot of apps handling sensitive data (as well as AES: http://blog.pubnub.com/pubnub-adds-cross-platform-aes-symmet...). It of course has to (and does) work seamlessly with PubNub Channel Presence, Message History and other features of the real-time messaging infrastructure. The key to providing an affordable pay-as-you-go pricing plan is scale, whereby fixed costs of the globally-deployed messaging infrastructure are amortized across thousands of apps, millions of concurrent users and billions of sent and received messages: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pubnub-cloud-exceeds-1-million.... More info available at help.pubnub.com FAQs.

This is offtopic, but the main admin of a forum I've been on for the past 7 years is called Tambur.

Either this is an uncanny concidence, or Hello Tambur!

A Tambur is a musical instrument. Learn to google, please.

That wasn't the point.

And I actually played a version of the tambur as a kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburica

That was the point, your suggestion was that it was either an uncanny coincidence (really?) or someone you know. My contention was that as a word that returns two and a half million results on Google, it was obviously neither.

Two and a half million results doesn't make this word very common at all. Even "frolicking" returns twice that.

Besides, looking through the first two pages of those results, most are people's last names.

"Even" frolicking? Frolicking is a pretty common word. If it was called frolicking.io and you knew someone who went by the username, you would similarly assume it was either an uncanny coincidence or it was that person you knew?

Thank you, both of you, for such a relevant and intellectually stimulating discussion.

Blame the lack of a downvote button on my account.

Probably not because it's a verb. But I might, because finding small relationships between things makes life more interesting.

And now I'm very intrigued if there's a database of all or most english words ranked by their frequency. Something like the full Oxford English Dictionary, but with frequency ranks.

Congratulations on launching. Really interesting idea with lots of potential, nice work.

thanks for the kind words!

Seeing as pusher offers more bang for your buck, how does tambur differ?

I would love to see a demo linked from the home page.

thanks for the pointer... since it is that simple we definitely have to provide a small demo.

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