airtable.js VS ably-airtable-starter-kit

They have published an example too https://github.com/Airtable/airtable.js/blob/master/test/test_files/index.html

Install the Airtable JavaScript SDK to work with Airtable inside a Next.js application.

Initially using the airtable.js package we statically generated a splash page that pulls data from Airtable directly to the page.

Even with Airtable.js to help manage retries, reading data through the API is an uphill climb. Between the rate limits, pagination, and Airtable's unique filterBy parameter you'll find many little quirks. The API is especially slow and onerous when you need to make nested calls to source data from several tables to create a complete data view. And, as you leverage Airtable's ease of use to make updates to your base, your API calls can break as columns and tables change.

Airtable comes with a simple REST API to perform the basic CRUD operations on the data stored. You'll need to have a base i.e. a table/ sheet set up before you can check out the documentation. This is for a good reason - their whole documentation is dynamically displayed with real keys, ids, column names etc, along with sample responses, based off your data, making it super easy for you to just copy out the code and use as is. They provide this documentation in cURL and JavaScript. The JS code snippets require using the Airtable JavaScript Client SDK. Here's a look at the documentation for the chat app base.

If we make our front-end clients subscribe to this channel into which the listener is publishing database updates, we'll not only receive new messages as a result of insert operations in the database, but also updates on previous messages resulting from update operations on the database. Each Ably message comes with a unique msgId assigned by Ably, so we can make use of this to uniquely identify each message in the table. The database will be the single source of truth in the app and also useful if we'd like to load previous messages in the chat like in the Ably-Airtable starter kit example.

Check the full source code of the group chat app written in VueJS on GitHub and the live demo of the application at https://realtime-chat-storage.ably.dev/