Hi Scott,
Happy to help if I can but you have a lot of experienced Airtable folks in the thread already.
Observations…
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I have deep experience with both the Wordpress REST API and the Heartbeat API.
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Despite my WP Heartbeat experience, I’ve also built two integration projects where real-time data needed to flow into pages using Firebase Cloud Functions. Heartbeat (at its core) is really just a wrapper on a polling system. It’s not a true sockets API, however, truly real-time is a rare business requirement for content publishing.
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One area of concern that your team should have is forward-caching content from Airtable. As it stands, Airtable has some rather tight constraints on the number of API calls per second. In a climate where thousands of visitors could be making requests that open new API sessions with Airtable, you might hit a few ceilings. Airtable really wasn’t designed to be the backend for a broad and pervasive content presentation layer. As such, it lacks such concepts such as conditional GETs. I have experience building services that overcome these limitations with precision and performance.
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I typically don’t get involved in setting up bases, tables and such; my core consulting focus is process automation and data interchange, especially where video, real-time video analytics, and AI/ML intersect the requirements.
Best of luck with your project and be sure to publish the outcome in Show-and-Tell. We all love to see good success stories about Airtable.
– bill.french@gmail.com, Global Technologies Corporation
