Push notifications provide a useful bridge between web applications and mobile clients, enabling a more seamless user experience across screens. RethinkDB changefeeds make it easy for developers to add push notification support to existing applications–using an event-driven approach that doesn’t require the developer to add much additional plumbing.

In this blog post, I’ll demonstrate how to wire up RethinkDB changefeeds to iOS push notifications, conveying realtime updates to iPhone users. For my demo, I built a simple location checkin app that takes advantage of GPS on the user’s mobile device and RethinkDB’s geospatial indexing on the backend. When a user checks in, the backend sends a push notification to every user whose last checkin was made within 100 miles of the new checkin. A map view in the app displays pins, marking all the nearby checkins.

We’re proud to announce that after five years of development, RethinkDB is ready for production. Download RethinkDB 2.0 (Yojimbo) now!

We designed RethinkDB from the ground up to make building and scaling realtime apps dramatically easier. The cumulative development effort behind the project includes more than 2,000 improvements, implemented across 16 major releases. Our GitHub repository has nearly 30,000 commits, spanning the lifetime of the project.

Asynchronous web frameworks like Tornado and EventMachine simplify realtime application development in Python and Ruby. They support an event-driven programming model that fits the realtime web, making it easy to use WebSocket connections without blocking. You can plug in RethinkDB changefeeds—which allow you to subscribe to changes on database queries—to extend that event-driven model to your persistence layer, offering a full backend stack for pushing live updates to your frontend.

The upcoming RethinkDB 2.0 release introduces support for using Tornado and EventMachine to perform asynchronous queries in the Python and Ruby client drivers. When we announced the availability of the RethinkDB 2.0 release candidate last week, the updated client drivers weren’t quite ready yet. Today, we’re issuing fresh RethinkDB 2.0 RC client drivers that fully incorporate the new functionality (download them here).

The RethinkDB 2.0 release candidate is now available for testing. RethinkDB 2.0 is designed to make building and scaling realtime apps dramatically easier. The upcoming 2.0 launch is an important milestone, marking our very first production-ready release. We’ll announce commercial support options and other services alongside the release.

After five years of development, RethinkDB is ready for widespread adoption with the upcoming 2.0 release. The cumulative development effort behind the project includes more than 2,000 improvements, implemented across 16 major releases. Our most recent release, RethinkDB 1.16, dramatically expanded the changes command and introduced powerful support for building realtime web applications.

Join us Saturday, March 14 for a live RethinkDB training course. The two-hour workshop, taught by RethinkDB evangelist Ryan Paul and hosted online by our friends at Platzi, will teach you how to build realtime web applications with RethinkDB. The course is available for free—all you have to do is sign up.

The course includes:

• An introduction to RethinkDB and distributed databases
• A hands-on overview of ReQL, the RethinkDB query language
• A guided intro to building realtime apps with RethinkDB and Node.js
• An introduction to RethinkDB clustering and scalability best practices

Attend live to ask questions and participate interactively. If you can’t make it for the live session, you will be able to watch the recorded video later.