How would you build real time geospatial service?

4 points by swman 5y ago ↗ HN

I'm currently using Firebase + geofire to do very basic real time geospatial querying. Due to limitations, I cannot do additional filters, etc. I'd like to take it a step further but don't know much about putting together something real time and geospatial.

The use case is simple, basically people can add animal sighting posts and other people can then comment on them or mark that they also saw such an animal (like bears or coyote). Just for fun, I want to have it be real time so I can see what's in my area and also if the # of coyote seems to be going up, etc. Since its a mobile app, a bunch of mobile clients will be listening for updates on posts in their area.

What database technology can I use to put this together?

2 comments

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ianpurton 5y ago ↗

One option is to look at supabase https://supabase.io/

This would be a postrgres database with geospatial support and support for realtime subscriptions.

Also https://hasura.io/ has support for realtime.

brudgers 5y ago ↗

"Real time" is a perception.

What matters is the appropriate limit to latency, because there is the speed of light.

For animal sightings, a few minutes is probably fine since that seems to work in places like Yellowstone National Park.

For a few minutes, email or SMS will work.

Good luck.