The Lightstreamer Blog

Amazon AMIs for Lightstreamer Moderato Now Available

2013-05-24T21:00:00.001+02:00

Cloud services like Amazon AWS are a perfect way to reduce the time and costs associated to exploring, testing, and deploying new technologies. You choose an AMI, launch an EC2 instance and you are done. A brand new machine with all the software you need is ready to use!

The good news is that now we provide free public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with pre-installed Lightstreamer Server, Moderato Edition.

If you want to explore Lightstreamer for the first time, need to test your own Adapters, or you are ready to deploy your production machine, you don't even need to download and install the Lightstreamer distro anymore. Just launch an EC2 instance and Lightstreamer Moderato is up and running.

To know all the details and find the latest AMI IDs for all the Amazon regions, together with direct bookmarks to the AWS Console, just visit www.lightstreamer.com/moderatoAMI

From there, you can also jump to the Amazon AMI Catalog page related to the latest version of the AMIs.

Go and check it out right now! And feel free to let us know your comments and feedback.

Meet our Partners: Wirex

2013-05-16T14:43:00.000+02:00

A short interview with Alessandro Negro, CTO at Wirex, an Italian software house providing platforms for gaming, betting and gambling operations.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Wirex was founded in 2002 and its products cover the whole spectrum of the iGaming industry with a wide offer of internally developed software, including a players management platform, a live casino, a RNG Casino, and a sports betting platform, all of which are easy to integrate among one another to provide maximum flexibility.

Could you let us know any further information? (Number of customers, covered regions, revenues..)

Our company has two offices in Italy, each of them with specific specializations, and a fully owned business development unit in Malta. The company reached a significant penetration in the Italian and Maltese markets, is approaching new targets including Greece, Austria, and Spain, and has recently started to consider US, India and Southeast Asia as approachable markets.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Our portfolio comprehends land casinos and gaming operators of every size, including companies listed in the London Stock Exchange and several others with an international prominence. Our customers include Sportingbet, PKR, Playbet, and Mybet.

What do you do for Wirex and what are you responsible for?

As a Chief Technology Officer, I manage and supervise several aspects in software development, including architecture, design, middlewares selection, and coding best practises.

Which applications or services are currently powered by Lightstreamer within your offer?

Within our Live Casino offer, Lightstreamer is currently powering a specific variant of the popular BlackJack game, called ‘BlackJack Studio’, which is based on a 1-on-1 interaction between player and dealer. This game features a high level of interactivity, and requires a high performance, bi-directional data push server. Furthermore, Lightstreamer is also part of the entire gaming back-end infrastructure, including a number of real-time monitoring systems, and the whole chat system between players and with croupiers. We just completed a Live Casino project that included Lightstreamer for Portomaso, a famous Maltese land-based casino.

How many players are, on average, in a Live Casino platform?

Live casino platforms offer video streams of real persons as dealers, and require to handle a large amount of frequently updated data, in order to keep the user interface responsive and offer the players a pervasive, truly ‘live’ gaming experience. Thus, it’s not hard to understand that the overall complexities are drastically higher comparing to a standard, even big sized RNG online casino. Giving some numbers, a mid-sized live casino holds 4 to 20 BlackJack Studio tables, with up to 10/20 players/users per table. Roulette and Punto Banco have different numbers; for example, 3 real roulettes are enough to power up to hundreds of virtual tables. Our platform also features a queue management system if tables are full, to keep the whole gaming experience enjoyable even in case of players’ overcrowding.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

On the client side our applications are mostly written in HTML and JavaScript, with a solid Java core on the server side.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

We did not developed any native apps for mobile and tablets yet, but we made web-based, ‘lite’ version of some of our products to be available on smartphones. As Wirex decided to dismiss RTP for its iOS compatibility issues, Lightstreamer has been chosen as the unique, efficient real-time server to allow any desktop and mobile clients to join the same platform seamlessly.

Do you use Lightstreamer for bi-directional data push (that is, also for sending messages from the client to the server)?

Yes, Lightstreamer has been implemented for bi-directional data push from the beginning. iGaming platforms usually feature a big number of sources that send and receive data for a relatively high number of items (which include, for example, data from the game, players’ decisions and messages, and a bunch of real-time monitoring information). Most of them require high update frequencies both in the front-end side, to offer a reactive, enjoyable gaming experience, both in the back-end side, to power it with useful tools such as real-time alerts.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

No one at the moment, but we are going to evaluate them in the next future as we are planning to do another intensive session of tests and optimizations. We definitely appreciated the Lightstreamer Client APIs, which allowed us to push key gaming information in real-time with just a tiny coding effort on our side.

Is Lightstreamer currently deployed in any other Wirex projects? If not, will it be included in any future projects?

Lightstreamer will be progressively deployed in other games, including Roulette and Punto Banco (a close relative of the more known game Baccarat). We are currently working on another online project for an Italian land-based casino, and we are exploring the deploying of Lightstreamer in other scenarios, including in-run betting platforms, in which players are allowed to join the action and place bets on events occurring during a sport match (e.g the outcome of a penalty kick in soccer). Our current roadmap include a progressive migration from WOWZA as a streaming server (keeping it as a video streaming server in any case), and the adoption of HTML5 as a front-end technology with Websocket as a client-server protocol. We have chosen Lightstreamer to handle its complexities swiftly.

We would be very grateful if you would like to provide a short recommendation to testify your experience with Lightstreamer technology and its support team.

After several months of use, we can state that Lightstreamer has been a winning choice, helping us to simplify the overall software architecture for real-time data transfers. The quality of the support we received was impressive, allowing us to rapidly overcome the few problems we encountered, and move ahead with a smooth integration. We managed to release a sturdy, Lightstreamer powered iGaming application in a truly short time, as everything worked like a charm since the beginning.

Meet our Customers: Rai

2013-04-18T12:17:00.000+02:00

A short interview with Espedito Longo, Project Manager (Technological Services) at Rai, one of the most important broadcasting organizations in Europe.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Rai is the owner of the Italian national public service radio and television broadcasting license, and one of the most important communication firms in Europe. The company has the ability to conceive, design, and develop contents (which include news, movies for cinema and TV, TV formats, and others) to distribute through a wide range of media including Sat TV, DTT, and the Internet. The main objective of Rai Net, fully owned by Rai and founded in June 1999, is to develop and improve the web as a channel for effectively promoting and easily distributing the aforementioned contents to all Italians.

Could you let us know any further information?

Rai employs more than 10,000 people, serves over 16 million families as paying users, and owns more than 1,500 branded websites (for entertainment, news, or service) that attract an overall average of 8 million unique visitors a month. The several apps for smartphones and tablets published by Rai recorded more than 900,000 download since their launch dates. In 2011, Nielsen Media Research revealed a significant decrease in annual aggregated advertising revenues (-4%), excluding the web specifically, which recorded +12.3% compared to the previous period. The consolidation of this channel in terms of usage volumes and popularity, and the related capacity to raise growing investments from advertisers, increased the position of the web within the group’s strategy and offer.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Born as the national public TV service licensee, Rai started its activity operating as the only Italian broadcaster and directed its offer of contents to a wide, general audience, also due to initial technical limitations of the analog television. DTT and Sat TV technologies on a side, and Web technologies (VODs, Second Screens, Smart TVs) on the other, overcome the national borders, allowed the enlargement of the offer with thematic channels, and enriched it with increased interactivity. Thus, as the technologies progress, even TV audience appears to be more segmented compared to past.

Could you please describe your product/service that integrates Lightstreamer?

For Rai Net, the Lightstreamer technology has been integrated in the Rai.tv SocialTV platform that allows users to send and receive instant messages during a TV show and get extra contents. This Social TV platform went live to support Sanremo, a popular music competition for unreleased Italian songs. During the show, the audience has been able to discuss the performances and get goodies, extra contents that include texts, videos on-demand, “behind the scenes” footage, and real-time interviews with singers and artists. Ballarò, another popular talk show broadcasted weekly, has also been associated with a Lightstreamer-powered Social TV platform during this season’s shows.

Lightstreamer is currently used in the Social TV platform to push users’ messages and editors’ featured contents to all concurrent users. It has already been inserted in the Rai’s future plans, as its usage will be extended to push real-time news in several web portals that we are going to update.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

The application we mentioned is HTML-based, but it (and Lightstreamer as a part of it) has been also integrated in the Rai.TV apps that we released for smartphones and tablets, both for iOS and Android.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

When a SocialTV event is active, the platform can be accessed through the following URL: http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/eventi.html.

Samsung and its competitors launched “always connected” TVs, and smartphones and tablets’ growth appear to be relentless, creating a definitely more interactive and ‘social’ way to watch TV, not only on the home screen. Is the future of the TV on the web?

The possibilities given by the IP protocol for all devices, including smart TVs, will radically change the traditional idea of television known so far, turning it into a true multimedia domestic hub in a short time. Today, it’s already possible to have Catch Up TV services, VOD, news browsing, web search, and popular social networks on a common Smart TV. Two issues arose and need to be solved soon:

On protection of intellectual property for content owners - broadcasting via IP on master screens can’t be unruled as part of the web is today. Broadcasters’ legitimate interests have to be protected.
On technological standards - is mandatory to find a standard that would get along with open industry standards, such as MHP, and proprietary technologies, owned by manufacturers.

In the 2011 financial statements, Rai declared that "the web represents, paired with DTT, a key medium for the group’s industrial and editorial strategy for its growing diffusion among the Italian families and for its ability to define deep innovations in the overall media offer, consumption, and business". What future can be predicted for the web as a medium, according to Rai as a mature, traditional broadcaster?

Rai is still not considering its over-IP offer as the key element of its strategic roadmap for products and customer development so far. Right now, the offer can definitely be considered as A-class, both for contents and technologies, but steps need to be done to improve the quality of communications and the integration with traditional media. Broadcasting and content delivery via IP will be progressively considered essential, and it needs to be declined on Smart TV, to keep the overall strong linear development aligned with the non-linear one.

“In the future, no television advertisements will be just self-contained narratives. They will be trailers into deeper branded digital experiences”, declared Shiv Singh, Global Head of Digital of PepsiCo. The web will undoubtedly be the medium in which all the others will converge. Which grade of interactivity will be needed to make this possible?

Italy has always been a step behind Europe, United States, and Asian markets in advertising and digital cross-mediality. We would see enhanced advertisements in a short time syncing the traditional TV ads with second screens, delivering extra contents and changing the fruition paradigm through an audience that now expects to be interconnected, both directly and on social networks.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

Rai Net appreciated Lightstreamer as a flexible, versatile, and easy-to-install product. Concerning the integration with other components of the Social TV platform we developed, it proved to be truly valuable. We managed to integrate the technology both for iOS and Android in a really short time, and we are also currently planning to integrate Lightstreamer in Multimedia Home Platforms and Connected TVs. Its support team was really quick in answering and overly proactive so far, and this is the true added value compared to other products currently available on the market. Plus, we always inquired the support team to ask for help, never to notify of product bugs.

Meet our Customers: IG

2013-04-08T12:12:00.001+02:00

A short interview with Ivan Gowan, Head of IT Development at IG, the world’s first financial spread betting company.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Company's core businesses are Contracts for Difference (CFDs) and Spread Betting.

Could you let us know any further information?

IG Group (LSE:IGG), headquartered in London, began its activity in 1974 as the world’s first financial spread betting company. In the first half of 2012, IG Group recorded GBP 366.8M (+17.3% from the previous area) in trading revenues and GBP 185.7M in profit before tax. With offices in 14 countries across five continents, we execute more than five million transaction a month for over 140,000 global clients.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Our client base is focused made up of people who in the main are decision makers and lean towards people who have significant disposable income.

What does your application or service do?

Our dealing platforms provide retail clients with the ability to deal on tens of thousands of markets in real time.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Lightstreamer is used to provide streaming of prices and deal confirmations to the dealing platforms. It is also used to stream data to our charts applications.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

Our Web Dealing Platform uses HTML, JavaScript, and Flex for our Charts.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Our native Mobile Dealing Platforms use the native libraries for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and J2ME.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

Clients can see our web sites www.igindex.co.uk, www.igmarkets.co.uk or find the various IG mobile apps here.

IG Index won many accolades and awards from industry groups and financial media during the years. Could you please list some of them?

Our recent awards include Investors Chronicle/Financial Times "Best Spread Betting Provider" and "Best CFD Provider" Awards 2012, and What Investment magazine "Spread Betting Provider of the Year" Awards 2011, 2010, 2009, among the many others. An extensive list of IG Index awards is available online here.

Which will be the next steps IG Group will take to keep improving its online services in the near future?

IG Group have just rolled out Price Alert push notifications on our native mobile platforms. This was a heavily requested feature from our clients and has been well received.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

In our experience Lightstreamer have repeatedly demonstrated their in depth expertise in streaming over the web with deep knowledge of the difficulties one faces. Our experience of Lightstreamer support has been very positive, they have set a high bar for other vendors to strive to achieve. Responses to questions about our design or rollout as well as support issues have been very prompt and detailed. They are very proactive in helping to resolve issues.

Meet our Customers: OptionMonster

2013-03-18T14:25:00.001+01:00

A short interview with Danny Maguire, VP Program Management Office at OptionMonster, a Chicago-based financial company that provides private investors with insight, ideas, and education on the US equities and options market.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

optionMONSTER® is a Chicago-based company that provides stock market insight, option trade ideas, and options education to meet the needs of do-it-yourself investors.
tradeMONSTER™, a powerful online trading platform for active stock, option and futures traders who demand professional grade online trading tools, has been launched in 2008, separated from but affiliated with optionMONSTER®.
stockMONSTER®, founded in 2006, is the third member of the family and helps self-directed investors to read news and analysis in order to invest with confidence.

What do you do for OptionMonster and what are you responsible for?

I have a variety of responsibilities including managing technology projects, market data, vendor relationship management, contracts, intellectual property, technology business development, proposal writing, budgeting.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Our typical user is an active investor or trader who engages in equity options strategies.

Which applications or services are currently powered by Lightstreamer within your offer? For what functionalities?

We use Lightstreamer to provide streaming data to our brokerage application, tradeMONSTER.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

We have a Flex-based front end for desktops and an HTML5-based front end for mobile devices.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

We provide hybrid apps for iOS and Android.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

We are using all of these features.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

You must be registered to use our product. Join us!

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

We are very satisfied with our decision to use Lightstreamer. It has proven to be a reliable, scalable and cost-effective product. We also sincerely appreciate the excellent technical support we receive from the Lightstreamer team.

Lightstreamer's customers dominated the Shares Awards 2012

2013-02-25T15:15:00.000+01:00

We are very excited to announce that several Lightstreamer's customers in the financial industry, where our product consolidated its success and value, have been awarded for the coveted Shares Awards 2012 on November 15, 2012 at London's Grovenor House Hotel.

This prestigious UK's financial services gala reached its 11th edition this year, and it's certainly recognized as one of the most widely known and desired prizes as a clear benchmark of excellence and innovation across the industry.

Shares is in fact the UK's leading weekly publication for stock market professionals and private investors and as such is read weekly by thousands of analysts, fund managers, stockbrokers, company directors and private investors. Published every Thursday since 1999, has now developed a strong following and a widespread 'trading desk credibility' in the City.

The whole celebration is traditionally around the Financial Service Provider of the Year Award, the main and most known prize assigned during the event. Back in the days, it has been deservedly won by IG Index in 2009 and IG Group in 2010, both of which integrated Lightstreamer in their platforms since 2005. Hargreaves Lansdown, which has recently chosen Lightstreamer for its platforms, overcame a number of valuable competitors and resulted as the overall winner for the 2012 edition.

The Financial Service Provider of the Year Award is offered to the firm which gains the overall greatest number of votes across each of the 27 categories from the Shares' readers. This is a strong achievement and a priceless testament of the success of a company and its products and service: it's not so easy to stand out and be acclaimed directly by a truly discerning audience like the readers of the Shares Magazine are.

Below are some Lightstreamer-powered financial firms that resulted as winners in this year's edition:

Best CFD Provider City Index
Best Online Trading Platform IG
Best Spread Betting Service IG
Financial Provider of the Year Hargreaves Lansdown

Glad to be the beating heart in the best of breed in the financial industry, and Kudos to the winners!

Meet our Customers: Bùssola do Investidor

2013-01-14T11:08:00.000+01:00

A short interview with Frederico Skwara, Founder & CEO at Bùssola do Investidor, a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Bússola do Investidor is a website focused on providing tools and content to individual investors, within a social environment. We offer real time quotes, interactive charts for technical analysis, a portfolio manager and contents related to investments, such as news and articles.

Could you let us know any further information?

Currently, we operate in Brazil with quotes from BM&FBovespa, the Brazilian stock exchange. We have more than 60.000 registered users and almost 1.000 premium users. After participating on the Start-Up Chile program, we have been working on local versions for Chile, Colombia and Peru, the fastest growth Latin American economies, under the StreetInvestor brand.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Our focus is to provide professional tools at a low cost for Latin American individual investors, so this is our typical user. In Brazil, we have almost 600k individual investors in Stocks and 4.5mm in mutual funds. On the other top 5 Latin American economies, we have more than 2.5mm individual investors only in stocks.

What does your application or service do?

We provide a web based technical analysis tool, with real time market information. Investors can check quotes, charts, make and share their own analysis using drawings and indicators. Everything in real time, served by Lightstreamer.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Real-time streaming of quotes.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

In HTML. We have a flash based stock chart, but the real time updates are made using a Javascript API.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Not yet. We are currently developing a mobile version, but using the JS Lightstreamer API.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

We use Lightstreamer “as-is”, without advanced settings but we are very happy with the inherent benefits as smart pooling and with compatibility with older browsers.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

Check here. We have a free version with delayed quotes and a real time version for premium users. The pricing starts in R$24.90, which is equivalent to US$12.50 per month.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

Lightstreamer was a helpful ally on releasing our real time quoting system with the agility we needed as it provides world-class pushing platform seamlessly, with all SDKs we need and managing the challenges related to data streaming with compatibility in mind.

On iOS URL Connection Parallelism and Operation Queues

2013-01-08T12:47:00.000+01:00

The problem

Did you know iOS has a limit on the number of concurrent NSURLConnections to the same end-point? No? Maybe you should, we discovered it the hard way. Let's take a look.

Create a new single-view app project on Xcode and copy the following snippet inside the viewDidLoad event of your view controller:

- (void)viewDidLoad

{

 [super viewDidLoad];

 // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

 NSMutableArray *connections= [NSMutableArray array];

 for (int i= 0; i < 5; i++) {

  NSURL *url= [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://push.lightstreamer.com/lightstreamer/create_session.txt?LS_user=&LS_adapter_set=DEMO&LS_ios_version=1.0"];

  NSURLRequest *req= [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];

  NSURLConnection *conn= [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:req delegate:self startImmediately:NO];

  [connections addObject:conn];

}

 for (NSURLConnection *conn in connections)

  [conn start];

}

Then add some simple NSURLConnection delegate event handlers:

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse *)response

{

 NSLog(@"Connection %p did receive response %d", connection, [(NSHTTPURLResponse *) response statusCode]);

}

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data

{

 NSLog(@"Connection %p did receive %d bytes:\n%@", connection, [data length], [[[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding] autorelease]);

}

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didFailWithError:(NSError *)error

{

 NSLog(@"Connection %p did fail with error %@", connection, error);

}

So, what does this code do? It will open 5 simultaneous stream sessions to Lightstreamer's demo server. There's nothing secret with this code: if you read Lightstreamer's Network Protocol Tutorial you can see the URL request is compliant with the documentation. Except for that little "LS_ios_version" argument, which is needed to overcome NSURLConnection buffering.

Run it and you will see 5 concurrent connections gracefully opening and then receiving Lightstreamer's keepalive message ("PROBE") once every 5 seconds. Everything is fine, isn't it? More or less.

Now try to set the number of connections (in the for loop) to 6 or more, and you will have a surprise. From the sixth connection on, nothing will happen. The connection won't open, and if you wait long enough you will get something like this:

2013-01-07 17:03:27.828 LSConcurrencyTest3[31820:c07] Connection 0x715dd60 did fail with error Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001 "The request timed out." UserInfo=0xe03ea70 {NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=http://push.lightstreamer.com/lightstreamer/create_session.txt?LS_user=&LS_adapter_set=DEMO&LS_ios_version=1.0, NSErrorFailingURLKey=http://push.lightstreamer.com/lightstreamer/create_session.txt?LS_user=&LS_adapter_set=DEMO&LS_ios_version=1.0, NSLocalizedDescription=The request timed out., NSUnderlyingError=0x716d390 "The request timed out."}

Time out. Maybe you could think it's Lightstreamer's demo server which is limiting the number of concurrent connections. It's a reasonable doubt, so let's use something else. Let's try with the download of Apple's OS X 10.8.2 Combo Update, which is big enough (more on this later) to exhibit the same problem. Change the URL is this way:

  NSURL *url= [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1581/en_US/OSXUpdCombo10.8.2.dmg"];

Before running, comment connection:didReceiveData: delegate event handler or you console will be flooded. Now run it and you will see the same problem: 5 connections will connect and start, from the sixth on they will be frozen. And after a while a time out will appear.

The problem is evident with long running connections. Of course if your connections are exhausted in a second or two you could never notice it. But any long running connection exhibits the same problem. And note that it happens both on the simulator and on any iOS device.

Possible explanation

First of all, why does this happen? We don't know for sure, but the most reasonable explanation is that it is applying a limit that is part of the HTTP protocol specification itself. See here:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec8.html#sec8.1.4

As far as we know, there's no trace of this limit in Apple's documentation.

In our case, the problem pertains to streaming connections, which are typically open once the app starts and closed when the app terminates. A client may legitimately ask for more than 5 streaming connections to the same server. The underlying network connection details are completely hidden to Lightstreamer's client library users. They may simply not know that one more connection will be frozen while all the previous ones will run without a hitch. Moreover, the connection that is going to be frozen will end up in a time out error indistinguishable from a real network time out. You will have the perception your network is broken, when it is actually working perfectly. This may make it quite hard to track down the reason.

The problem can't be solved directly, this limit is hard-coded in iOS. The only way to overcome the limit is to use different host names for the same end-point, that is: making the system think they are different end-points. Clearly, most of the times this is outside of the reach of client-side developers. So, if you can't overcome the limit, at least try to live with it. Is there a generic way you can control how many connections are open toward an end-point?

Solution #1: use an operation queue

There are many open source libraries out there that remap an NSURLConnection on an NSOperation, so that they can be added to an operation queue, started, cancelled, limited on their concurrency and so on. NSOperationQueue, in fact, has a specific method to set a maximum level of concurrency:

- (void)setMaxConcurrentOperationCount:(NSInteger)count

but this method has a couple of important constraints:

it applies only to concurrent operations, which are a particular type of operation (see here), not to every operation; if your implementation does not supply concurrent operations this method call will be completely ineffective: your operation queue will continue to work unbound;
even if your operations are concurrent, this limit is not strictly enforced.

For some reasons, the operation queue may start a concurrent operation even if there are already count operations running. The limit may be exceed by 1 or 2, based on our experience. It's not much, but enough to cause time outs. During our investigation on how to solve the problem, of course using an operation queue popped out as the first and simplest solution. But when we discovered this limit may be exceeded it was clear we had to find another way.

Solution #2: write your own thread pool

Yes, sooner or later you will come to the point where you won't trust "foreign" code anymore and will write your own stuff.

An operation queue is basically a thread pool with the pool managed by the system. It's the system that decides whether a new operation will be enqueued or executed on a thread. It's the system that creates and releases new threads (left alone concurrent operations, where it's you that should create your own thread). So, if this automatism is not functioning as expected, what's better than create a good-old thread pool where YOU create and release threads and YOU decide when an operation is going to be enqueued or not? Nothing, in fact that's what we did.

Our thread pool implementation has a fixed number of threads, and you can be safe the limit won't be exceeded. It also contains a queue with the operations it has to execute. Each time a thread completes an operation, it fetches the next operation from the queue. Once a thread has no more operation to execute, it is scheduled for disposal, and a timed collector will dispose of it soon after. Add a new operation and the thread will be restarted.

Based on this generic thread pool we created a structure called URL dispatcher, which uses thread pools to run URL connections. Keeping always in mind the aforementioned limit per end-point. Actually, the URL dispatcher keeps a separate thread pool for each end-point, and runs the URL connection requests with it. Finally something that works.

The URL dispatcher applies some heuristics on URL connection requests:

first of all, it makes a distinction between long running requests and short running requests;
it always keeps some spare threads available for short running requests (typically 2 out of 5), which in our case are usually control connections (subscription, messages, and so on);
when a long running connection is requested it is able to tell in advance if it will run or not (based on the current size of the thread pool of its end-point);
if a long running connection can't be run because the limit has been reached, the requesting client can gracefully handle the condition;
finally, the Lightstreamer client uses this knowledge to notify the user and decide what to do: ignore the condition (the connection is going to be frozen), abort the connection or automatically switch to a polled connection (which uses short running requests); specific APIs to configure this behavior have been added.

Thread pools and the URL dispatcher have been introduced with iOS client library version 1.2, distributed with Lightstreamer server version 5.1. The StockList demo app, available on the App Store, already makes use of it. If you haven't upgraded to Lightstreamer 5.1 yet, this embedded piece of technology is worth the effort.

Update

The thread pool library has been released as open source and can be found on Lightstreamer's GitHub repository.

The New WinRT SDK and Demo

2012-12-27T14:31:00.000+01:00

With the introduction of Windows 8, a new application architecture, namely Windows Runtime or WinRT, was also introduced.

WinRT, which has to be used for an application to be published on the Windows Store, is not fully compatible with the old .NET framework. But don't worry, we've got you covered again: with the release of Lightstreamer 5.1 we have made available a brand new WinRT client SDK that can be used to develop Lightstreamer-enabled Windows Store apps.

As we are used to, we also show you how to leverage the new SDK with a simple Stock-List Demo application: you can install it from the store on your Windows 8 or Windows RT PC or tablet from this Windows Store page. (note: the install button does not work/appear on chrome).

Once installed the demo application will appear in your start menu. Click on the tile to launch the application

While the application is running, the live tile can be updated with new values from the "Ations Europe" stock

The full source code of the demo is available in the examples folder of the new SDK. Let's check it out.

The demo, which is a port of the Lightstreamer Windows Phone Stock-List demo, is made of three main source files:

App.xaml.cs is the main application file. It contains application event handling code (application launching, closed, activated, etc), Lightstreamer Client streaming controls (start, stop) and part of the auto-reconnection logic required when the connection quality is weak. It makea use of the Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataContainer API to store the current status of the start/stop button of the application.

MainPage.xaml.cs is the only page of the application. It handles the simple table and the live tile containing real-time stock quotes, which are kept up to date by implementing the custom ILightstreamerListener interface.

Several lines in this file are dedicated to the animation code used for highlighting cells using the UpdateCell class; on the other hand the handling of the live tile is in a proof of concept status as its life cycle was not taken much into account. Both the grid and live tile updates are handled by the OnItemUpdate method relying on the previously mentioned UpdateCell.
As the custom interface also offers the connection status, an image (and label) is kept synced with the current status of the connection through the OnStatusChange method.
The page also handles the Start/Stop button calls that are forwarded to the App class (from the App.xaml.cs file) and its "Charms Bar" that only contains a privacy policy link.

LightstreamerClient is a simple wrapper for LSClient public class (see Lightstreamer WinRT Client API) and uses two listeners: StocklistConnectionListener and StocklistHandyTableListener, respectively implementing a Connection Status listener (IConnectionListener) and a Real-Time Data Updates listener (IHandyTableListener). These classes simply forward all the events to a ILightstreamerListener, that in this case is our MainPage class from the MainPage.xaml.cs file.

Enjoy the new SDK and feel free to ask any question or report any issue on the dedicated forum.

Our Season's Greetings...

2012-12-21T16:49:00.000+01:00

It seems that even Lightstreamer has been affected by the holiday season mood :)

We would like to wish all the Lightstreamer users a happy holiday season and a prosperous 2013 year!

Thanks for supporting us.

Warm regards,
The Lightstreamer Team

Lightstreamer 5.1 Has Been Released

2012-12-21T12:47:00.000+01:00

We are very excited to announce that a new version of Lightstreamer is now publicly available for download.

The new package, tagged Lightstreamer 5.1 Colosseo 20121220, contains updated versions of several components (such as Lightstreamer Server 5.1, Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6.0.1, Lightstreamer iOS Client 1.2, etc.) as well as a brand new client SDK for Windows 8 WinRT.

WHAT'S NEW

Lightstreamer Server 5.1 contains several improvements:

Improved performance when parsing client requests (for both HTTP and WebSockets).
Optimization of the sendMessage facility over WebSockets. Extension of both the Monitor Console and the JMX interface to provide stats on the messages received from clients.
Increase in the degree of asynchronous behavior of the Adapter interfaces, now enabling blocking implementations. In particular, the locking policy and the sequentialization constraint on the invocation of the "notifyNewTables" and "notifyTablesClose" callbacks have been relieved. This applies to all the Adapter interfaces (Java, .NET, and Adapter Remoting Infrastructure). Read more on this new behavior...
Facility to automatically upload audit logs (for paid versions with Site licenses).
Several bug fixes.

Read more on the server-side improvements above...

Lightstreamer WinRT Client API 1.0 is a brand new SDK for developing real-time applications based on Microsoft Windows Runtime (WinRT) architecture for the Windows 8 operating system. A native WinRT library is provided, together with full API reference and a working example, which is also available from the Windows Store.

Lightstreamer JavaScript Client API 6.0.1 contains several bug fixes, together with performance improvements and expanded documentation and examples. Read more on the JS client improvements...

Lightstreamer iOS Client API 1.2 contains a brand new threading model and other improvements:

Now the library makes use of dynamic thread pools, for better performance and smaller memory footprint.
Code optimized for iPhone 5 chipset (armv7s) has been included.
Some bug fixes.

HOW TO UPGRADE

As always, you can upgrade your servers and your clients independently. You should upgrade the servers first, as Lightstreamer Server 5.1 is compatible with all older client libraries. Then you can upgrade the client libraries.

If you have a paid version of Lightstreamer (Allegro, Presto, or Vivace) and you have a valid support and maintenance agreement in place, you can get your new license keys by contacting info@lightstreamer.com. You can download the Lightstreamer 5.1 package from www.lightstreamer.com/download, after reading and agreeing to the updated Software License Agreement.

If you have the free version of Lightstreamer (Moderato) you don't need any license key. You can download the Lightstreamer 5.1 Moderato package from www.lightstreamer.com/download, after reading and agreeing to the updated Software License Agreement.

If you have an existing installation of Lightstreamer (either 4.x or 5.0), we suggest to do a fresh install of Lightstreamer 5.1, then:

CONFIGURATION

Take note of the changes you performed on the lightstreamer_conf.xml and lightstreamer_log_conf.xml configuration files and apply your changes to the new factory configuration files (should be easy, as the config files have not changed radically). Please check out the red COMPATIBILITY NOTES in the CHANGELOG (Lightstreamer Server section) to know about any compatibility changes in the configuration files.

ADAPTERS

Deploy your existing Adapters after reading the CHANGELOG (Adapters sections), to learn about any possible compatibility issue and if you need to recompile your code.

CLIENTS

Please read carefully through the CHANGELOG (the section regarding your client SDK) to learn about any possible compatibility issue and if you need to recompile your code. In particular, if you are coming from an existing installation of Lightstreamer 4.x, consider that the JavaScript client library has completely changed, so you will need to port your existing JS code after learning how the new library works (a tutorial on how to port your code from JS Client 5 to JS Client 6 is available on our blog).

Meet our Customers: EFG Hermes

2012-12-19T14:01:00.001+01:00

A short interview with Waleed Kamel, Software Development Manager at EFG Hermes, a premier investment bank in the Middle East.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

EFG Hermes is a premier investment bank in the Middle East and is recognized as the market leader in securities brokerage, asset management, investment banking, private equity, and research in this area. EFG Hermes has a huge number of customers, ranging from governments and corporations to institutional and individual investors.
The firm is listed on the Egyptian and London Stock exchanges. Yet, we provide many software products to our clients to facilitate the stock trading activities, disseminating a real-time market data feed and orders in different flavors (Windows, Web and handheld based systems).

Could you let us know any further information?

EFG-Hermes holding is the leading Investment Banking firm in the region with presence in the Egyptian market since 1984 and regionally since 2004. The company’s assets under management reached equivalent of USD 8.17 billion in 2010. The company HQ is located in Cairo with branches and subsidiaries in UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and expansion plans to cover Lebanon and Bahrain in addition to other emerging markets in the region. EFG Hermes employs over 1000 people from more than 25 nationalities and provide services to clients in 9 countries across the region. We serve over 20,000 customers across Meddle East region.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

We serve a wide range of users who look for a professional services in the stock exchanges field. We provide Web, Windows and iPad based systems.

What does your application or service do?

EFG Hermes applications are utilizing Lightstreamer to disseminate a real-time stock market data feed to the clients. We collect the data feed from different markets in different hubs, manipulate such data and re-disseminate them to our clients.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Disseminating real-time data, with scalability and high refresh rate support.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

Actually all, we have three different applications relying on the same Lightstreamer engine, with HTML, WPF and iOS based applications.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Yes, for iPad (iOS).

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

Scalability, frequency control, data snapshot, fast sending rates, and TCP bandwidth optimization.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

Published only for subscribed clients, https://marketbeat.hermesonline.com.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

After over 4 years of experience with Lightstreamer, it proved to be a very reliable engine, which has rich features and functionalities and great libraries that really facilitate client’s implementation. I really appreciated its responsible and dedicated support team. I would recommend Lightstreamer as a world class quality product with a reasonable price.

Meet our Customers: BuzzAllStars

2012-12-11T10:44:00.001+01:00

A short interview with Rob O'Dea, founder and CEO at BuzzAllStars, an innovative social gaming platform that allows players to interact and compete during live sports events.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Buzz All Stars is a platform for interactive social games that will revolutionize the way sports fans engage with each other through live sports, creating the ultimate social gaming experience.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Sports fans on mobile.

What does your application or service do?

We offer social games based on live sport matches. Every player tries to predict the outcome of the next play during a live sports event and win points, competing against friends.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

We deployed Lightstreamer to push the live sports feeds to our apps.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

We are now using Appcelerator Titanium Pro for the mobile app development.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Yes, we are currently developing for Android and iPhone.

Do you use Lightstreamer for bi-directional data push (that is, also for sending messages from the client to the server)?

Yes, we have a chat component that is currently using Lightstreamer.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

We are still in a development phase. We expect the completion to be on January 2013.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

We have been extremely pleased with the support, reliability and performance of the Lightstreamer platform.

Lightstreamer won a comparison at Java2Days 2012 Conference

2012-11-22T11:16:00.000+01:00

We are happy to see that Lightstreamer resulted the winner in a presentation titled "Realtime Apps with Lightstreamer, GWT & HTML5" by Detelin Zlatev and Mariyan Nenchev from Cayetano Gaming, at the recent Java2Days 2012 Conference.

Java2Days 2012 Conference took place on October 25-26 in Sofia, Bulgaria to highlight today’s cutting edge Java trends in field of software development, technologies, and business.

Cayetano Gaming, one of the official sponsors of the conference, is a leading provider of online casino software, wholly owned and managed by Paddy Power PLC, the biggest betting and gaming company in Ireland and one of the biggest in Europe.

Lightstreamer has been evaluated versus DWR, the Atmosphere framework, and a custom solution built on Servlet 3.0, to stream a large amount of data per second, with no delays, to a large number of concurrent users both on desktop and mobile. Lightstreamer proved to be the most suitable solution for its high scalability, low bandwidth consumption, adaptive data throttling, and live monitoring characteristics. Furthermore, the Lightstreamer behavior has been appreciated for its "graceful degradation when CPU is saturated", allowing to keep the quality of the data stream excellent. You can download and read the whole presentation here.

The Real-Time Web is getting a growing attention from the gaming industry as an easy and cost-efficient way to allow developers and producers of browser-based, mobile, desktop, or social games to focus on the effort to make catchy and pervasive game designs and concepts, deputing the Lightstreamer solution to manage all the complexities of bi-directional live data distribution.

Lightstreamer has been recently selected by bwin.party to power its Poker, Casino, and Bingo online platforms. Read all the details here.

Meet our Customers: LearnShip

2012-11-13T10:43:00.000+01:00

A short interview with Jürgen Jatzkowski, CTO at LearnShip, a specialist in online foreign languages training.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

LearnShip is a specialist in online foreign languages training. The LearnShip platform offers a state-of-the-art virtual classroom for individual or small groups lessons, integrating an advanced multimedia digital technology to provide a face-to-face educational experience simply impossible to replicate in the traditional classroom settings. Learnship offers qualified instructors teaching in their native language and more flexibility comparing to any other traditional language school, as students can join the lessons regardless of where they effectively are - just a computer and a Internet access is needed.

Could you let us know any further information?

We have a number of Top-500 customers like Bertelsmann, Bosch and Panasonic (http://www.learnship.de/openArea/customer). These are using our platform from places spread all over the world.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

The typical user is working in an international context where he needs well educated language skills. Our platform helps in improving the necessary language skills while being very flexible when providing training sessions independent of the user's place and timezone.

What does your application or service do?

LearnShip consists of an online virtual learning platform for foreign languages study.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Lightstreamer provides the necessary real-time functionalities which are needed to connect the teacher and his students in the virtual classroom. This includes the management of the communication lines as well as the display of teaching material.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

Our portal is based on HTML.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Currently there is no native app available apart from some prototypes.

Do you use Lightstreamer for bi-directional data push (that is, also for sending messages from the client to the server)?

Yes, this is a very important feature for our application.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

Check out http://www.learnship.de/sprachen-lernen/englisch

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

We are very pleased with the LightStreamer product and are impressed by it's stability and performance. Even if there are questions regarding configuration or development (e.g. usage of API) we are enlightened to get fast and high quality responses.

Meet our Customers: DCM Capital

2012-11-07T10:57:00.000+01:00

A short interview with Paul Laight, CTO of DCM Capital Ltd, an online CFD, Forex and spread betting platform with unique social media twitter sentiment analysis technology.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

The world’s first multi-asset online trading platform with integrated social media sentiment analysis technology.

Clients can trade CFDs and Spread Bets on over 7000 different stocks, currencies and commodities from around the world and monitor the global sentiment on any asset in real-time.

Could you let us know any further information? (Number of customers, covered regions, revenues, etc.)

We are expecting to have over 2500 customers from around the world within the first half of 2013 after we launch in January with over £100m worth or daily trade volume going through our DCM Dealer trading platform.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Retail traders.

What does your application or service do?

Our application is an online CFD, Forex Trading, and Spread Betting platform with a built-in social media sentiment analysis tool. Investors and traders will be able to monitor global sentiment and trade on any stocks, currencies and commodities in real-time.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Lightstreamer is the engine we use to push prices, sentiments, and news on real-time.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

Our platform is written in Javascript.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Not now, but we are planning to develop native apps for smartphones and tablets after our official launch.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

We are still in a development phase. The public launch of our platform is expected for January 2013. [Note: a demo of a Lightstreamer-powered application is currently online on the DCM website home page.]

We would be very grateful if you would like to provide a short recommendation to testify your experience with Lightstreamer technology and its support team.

Lightstreamer has enabled us to develop a cutting edge trading platform. It is feature rich and allows for easy integration into any system. We use it for a range of real-time systems within our organisation which would have been impossible using other technologies. Throughout development the Lightstreamer support team have helped us make the Lightstreamer integration into our DCM Dealer platform both easy and cost effective.

Lightstreamer Goes All In with bwin.party

2012-10-25T15:58:00.000+02:00

We are thrilled to announce that the Lightstreamer technology has been selected by bwin.party to power its world-class gaming and betting platforms.

According to their public statements, the Group has generated pro-forma net revenues in 2011 of €816.0m and commands leading market positions in four product verticals: online sports betting, poker, casino, and bingo, with some of the world’s biggest online gaming brands including bwin, PartyPoker, PartyCasino and Foxy Bingo with proprietary gaming platforms.

Reporting from Technology and Product page on bwin.party's official website, "Our significant investment in technology over the past decade has put us at the forefront of the online gaming industry - a position we intend to retain through a continuous programme of development and investment". The Lightstreamer Real-Time Web technology will be progressively integrated in the group's online poker, casino, and bingo product verticals.

The growing competition in the gaming and gambling industry induces an effort to make faster, more pervasive, and interactive games.
Lightstreamer offers game developers and producers of browser-based, mobile, desktop, or console games a real-time data streaming solution that enables them to keep focused on the game design and development, forgetting about the complexity of exchanging real-time data over the Web.

Read all the details of the official Press Release below (link).

Bwin.party Gaming Platforms to be Powered by Lightstreamer Real-Time Technology
The Lightstreamer technology will be used by bwin.party, a global leader in digital entertainment, for pervasive live data delivery over the web.

MILAN, ITALY -- (October 24, 2012) – Weswit, a global leader in real-time web solutions, today announced that bwin.party (LSE:BPTY), the global online gaming company, has re-selected Lightstreamer to power its world-class gaming and betting platforms.

bwin.party, which has millions of customers worldwide and pro forma net revenue in 2011 of €816.0 million, will progressively deploy Lightstreamer in its online poker, casino, and bingo product verticals.

Lightstreamer is a massively scalable solution for pushing live data over WebSockets and other web protocols, to millions of users. With a growing number of customers ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, the Lightstreamer technology enables the streaming of real-time gaming data and messaging across multiple channels and apps, including HTML5, Android, iPhone, iPad, and many other platforms.

“Lightstreamer was the clear scalable solution to handle the complex real-time data communication required by our state-of-the-art gaming products,” commented Tod Martin, bwin.party’s Group Technology Director. “We are confident the Lightstreamer solution will provide the highest quality gaming experience for our customers."

“We are honoured that Lightstreamer will be part of bwin.party’s online gaming platforms,” declared Mauro Fantechi, Co-CEO and Chairman at Weswit. “Being deployed in such well-known, cross-platform gaming environments, our solution keeps confirming its value for the betting and entertainment industries, which are at the forefront of technological development and innovation.”

“It is truly exciting to know that bwin.party has selected our Lightstreamer real-time web technology,” added Alessandro Alinone, co-CEO and CTO at Weswit. “Lightstreamer takes care of all the complexity of delivering real-time data over the web, reducing the technological risks and drastically enhancing the pervasiveness of games”.

Lightstreamer is made up of a high-performance server, which routes the real-time messages over the web protocols, and a rich set of client libraries, which easily enable any application to send and receive live data in an efficient and reliable way. Lightstreamer can reach any desktop and mobile client, whatever connectivity the user experiences, passing through any kind of proxies and firewalls. Features include bandwidth optimisation, adaptive throttling, data conflation, delta delivery, and total control over the quality of service.

How to Upgrade to JavaScript Client Library 6

2012-09-11T17:15:00.001+02:00

The new JavaScript client version brings some new interesting features and some long-awaited changes. This time we’ve chosen not to pass from the deprecate-first remove-then path as we’ve always done: in fact the entire API was completely designed from scratch to be more flexible and easy to use. Unfortunately, this also means that some effort is necessary to migrate your code using the Lightstreamer HTML Client 4 or 5 to the new Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6.
This guide was written to help you with the migration. Only the simplest way to do the porting is illustrated; it is obviously possible to use more complicated techniques. Also following only the guide you will not exploit many of the new capabilities of the library, so, before doing the porting I suggest you to check the changelog, the new Development Guide and the Tutorial.

While doing the porting you should keep the new API documentation at hand. To help with the comparison you may want to keep an eye on the old documentation too.

AMD vs. Globals

In the past, our HTML client library contained some html files that had to be deployed with the js ones. Due to this you were limited on deploying the lightstreamer client libraries on the same server where the html front-end was hosted.
All of those files were eliminated: you can now deploy the Lightstreamer JS client library file anywhere on the web, even on a third party CDN, and just import it in your html file(s).

The library is now fully modularized AMD style even if, at least at the moment, we do not distribute the single modules each one in its own file. Instead you’ll find three version of an all-in-one file.

lightstreamer.js contains all the modules define calls. You need an AMD loader (like requirejs) to use this file: include our library after the AMD loader and then start coding using the require method to load our classes:
require(["LightstreamerClient"],function(LightstreamerClient) {
var testClient = new LightstreamerClient(...);
[...]
});

lightstreamer_globals.js if your project does not already use an AMD loader and you don’t want to add one you can include this file that will automatically create a global object per each of our public classes, so after including the js library, you directly instantiate our classes:var testClient = new LightstreamerClient();
[...]

lightstreamer_namespace.js if your project comprehends AMD modules other than Lightstreamer’s ones you probably want to avoid name collisions. If that’s the case you can use this version of the library like this: require(["Lightstreamer/LightstreamerClient"],function(LightstreamerClient) {
var testClient = new LightstreamerClient(...);
[...]
});

If you want global names but would like to have one single entry point (like using the old Lightstreamer.avoidLSGlobals flag set to true) you don’t have a ready-made solution. Don’t panic, our generator tool will help you out making it possible to generate a namespaced library to be used like this:var testClient = new Lightstreamer.LightstreamerClient(...);
[...]

QUICK ACTION: remove lscommons.js and lspushpage.js inclusions from your pages and include the lightstreamer_globals.js file. If you were using the Lightstreamer.avoidLSGlobals flag, head for the generator and create a namespaced library to be used in place of lightstreamer_globals.js.

NOTE: you will probably not use all of the available classes of the Lightstreamer JS client: the generator tool makes it possible to create a library file containing only the required classes.

Client-Side Errors

I know some of you awaited this change for years :) We’ve finally simplified the handling of client side errors.

We had different (admittedly too many) ways to consume those errors:

PushPage.onClientError and PushPage.onClientAlert callbacks.

LightstreamerEngine.onClientError and LightstreamerEngine.onClientAlert callbacks.

Context.setDebugAlertsOnClientError to enable/disable the use of alerts to show such errors (a Context instance was available on both PushPage and LightstreamerEngine instances)

Context.setRemoteAlertsOnClientError to enable/disable the forwarding of the errors to the server (a Context instance was available on both PushPage and LightstreamerEngine instances)

Now all of these methods/callbacks are gone and there is only one flexible way to consume error messages: with this version of the library we’re exposing our internal logging facility (that anyway was partially rewritten too) so that you will be able to use it to consume the errors.

To mimic the old behavior we need to hook an appender to the logging system and start listening to ERROR events on every category. Obviously some messages changed, others were removed and others are completely new.
The following code shows how to mimic the old code via your own callback, via remote messages to the server or via window.alert:

//First we need to init the logging system as it is disabled
//by default.
var loggerProvider = new SimpleLoggerProvider();
LightstreamerClient.setLoggerProvider(loggerProvider);

//CONSUME AS CALLBACK

//Create a FunctionAppender: we want it to be filtered
//by level (ERROR) and we want to consume all of the available
//categories (*)
var fc = new FunctionAppender("ERROR","*",function(lineOfLog) {
   //consume the lineOfLog string as you prefer;
   //the string itself contains time category and message
});

//add such appender to the logging system
loggerProvider.addLoggerAppender(fc);

//CONSUME AS ALERT

//we simply need to create and add the proper appender
//the 1 in the constructor of AlertAppender is the number of
//messages to gather before shwoing the alert
loggerProvider.addLoggerAppender(new AlertAppender("ERROR","*",1));

//CONSUME ON THE SERVER

//This appender requires a configured LightstreamerClient to send
//messages to the server; it is suggested to use the same instance
//you use in your application
var lsClient = new LightstreamerClient(...);
...
//Create and add the RemoteAppender
loggerProvider.addLoggerAppender(new RemoteAppender("ERROR","*",lsClient));

Note that only basic functionalities were shown in the above examples, check the API documentation for the details.

QUICK ACTION: remove all onClientError and onClientAlert callbacks implementations, substitute them with FunctionConsumers as explained in the CONSUME AS CALLBACK section of the above example.

Remove setDebugAlertsOnClientError(true) calls and substitute them with AlertConsumers as explained in the CONSUME AS ALERT section of the above example.

Remove setRemoteAlertsOnClientError(true) calls and substitute them with RemoteConsumers as explained in the CONSUME ON THE SERVER section of the above example.

PushPage/LightstreamerEngine

The PushPage class does not exist anymore. Also the LightstreamerEngine was removed from the APIs. All of their functionalities are now collapsed in the LightstreamerClient class.

Also the connection and policy properties of LightstreamerEngine (respectively Connection and Policy instances) were removed. On the other hand the new connectionOptions, connectionDetails and connectionSharing (ConnectionOptions, ConnectionDetails and ConnectionSharing instances) have been introduced as part of LightstreamerClient.

Some search and match is required to port the old behavior to the new APIs. The below box gives some useful hints to do it effectively.

QUICK ACTION: Replace your PushPage instance with a LightstreamerClient instance. Get rid of onEngineCreation/onEngineReady/onEngineLost callbacks.

Port calls made to PushPage, LightstreamerEngine, connection and policy to your LightstreamerClient, connectionSharing, connectionOptions and connectionDetails.

Any call made during the execution of the onEngineCreation/onEngineReady callbacks can now be made immediately after LightstreamerClient instantiation.

No need to dispose the LightstreamerEngine pointer during onEngineLost callbacks; whatever you were doing there can probably be moved to the DISCONNECTED handler.

Any other callback should be replaced by the proper listener. More on this on the Callbacks section of this guide.

As said new calls may have different names, matching most of the old calls with new calls is trivial. Here a list of the most complex cases:

changeStatus is now replaced by connect and disconnect calls. If for any reason (that I will never understand) you were explicitly asking for a POLLING session in your changeStatus call you can still do that using the new ConnectionOptions.setForcedTransport method.
createEngine/seekEngine functionalities were replaced by a single ConnectionSharing.enableSharing method.
NOTE: If you were using the NEW_SESSION directive in your createEngine call simply remove the call, this is the default behavior if no sharing is configured.
Otherwise use the name you were using in the createEngine/seekEngine call as first parameter and then, if you were using createEngine with SHARE_SESSION set ATTACH and CREATE as 2nd and 3rd parameters; use ABORT and CREATE if you were using FAIL; use ATTACH and WAIT if you were using a seekEngine call.
NOTE: to avoid wasting you should call enableSharing before calling connect. Not a requirement though.
addTable/removeTable are now called subscribe and unsubscribe. More on this on the Table section of this guide
setLSHost and setLSPort have been collapsed in the ConnectionDetails.setServerAddress method. It is also necessary to specify a protocol (http or https) now. See Lightstreamer JS Client - Deployment Config Matrix and the API documentation for details.
The PushPage.bind and the Context.setDomain methods are no more; see dedicated section.

PushPage.bind - Context.setDomain

Another big news is the removal of the bind method from the PushPage object and all the requirements it had. You can create now your LightstreamerClient, call enableSharing, connect and subscribe at any time.
Also with the removal of the Context class there is no way to set the domain on the page through our APIs: the Lightstreamer library now adapts itself to the domain it finds at any given moment on the page. All the possibilities of what will happen on the basis of the domain set, the browser, the front-end host and the Lightstreamer hosts is detailed in the Lightstreamer JS Client - Deployment Config Matrix

QUICK ACTION: if your application wasn’t using setDomain to change the domain on the page just remove the PushPage bind calls; otherwise remove both Context setDomain calls and PushPage bind calls and add a document.domain = "yourdomain.com" statement to your page (preferably before the Lightstreamer-related code)

Table Classes

The NonVisualTable was renamed to Subscription and is now the only “Table” class.
Once configured it can be activated through the LightstreamerClient.subscribe call (and deactivated through LightstreamerClient.unsubscribe).
The old VisualTable classes now acts as listeners for this new Subscription class (and thus it is possible to feed multiple VisualTable with a single subscription).

QUICK ACTION: per each Table instance in your application create a Subscription instance. Port all the subscription-related calls to such instance. Note that some function names are slightly different, and also their parameters need to be specified differently; matching is quite easy anyway.
Visual-related calls are explained in the next box. Callbacks porting is explained in the Callbacks section.

The following calls need a special treatment:

The order of the parameters in the constructor is now different. Also it is not possible to specify null to read the group/schema from the html page, to keep such behavior it is necessary to use the extractFieldList and extractItemList methods of DynaGrid/StaticGrid.

setCommandLogic is now splitted across different setCommand* and setCommandSecondLevel* calls. The flag parameter is then inferred by the values used for such calls.

The LightstreamerClient.subscribe method, unlike the addTable one, only accepts one parameter (the Subscription). To call the unsubscribe method the same object is required, not its id as such id does not exist anymore.

VisualTable
OverwriteTable, ScrollTable, MetapushTable are now collapsed into the StaticGrid class. The ScreenTableHelper functionalities have been collapsed there too.
DynaScrollTable, DynaMetapushTable, MultiDynaMetapushTable are now collapsed in the DynaGrid class. Note that such DynaGrid class can also be used as a “DynaOverwriteTable”

The new classes are not stricly Subscription-bound as the old Table were. This gives much more fliexibility to the visual framework of Lightstreamer (i.e.: you may even use the new grids without bounding’em to any subscription).

QUICK ACTION: per each VisualTable instance create the proper *Grid instance and port the visual-related call to it (my personal suggestion is to use DynaGrid even if you were using OverwriteTable, ScrollTable or MetapushTable). Again some function names are slightly different, check the API for details.

If you were using a ScreenTableHelper you can port its logic directly into your StaticGrid (thus no addScreenTableHelper calls or id matching needed anymore).

Bind each *Grid to the related Subscription using the Subscription.addListener call.

Callbacks porting is explained in the Callbacks section.

The following calls need a special treatment:

setClearOnAdd setClearOnRemove setClearOnDisconnect do not exist anymore, setAutoCleanBehavior substitutes them with a slightly different logic. The clean method can be used to clean the grid at any moment.

The new classes are not “added” anymore but the library still needs to know when you’re ready to bound the html to your grids: you can either specify a flag in the constructor to make the bound at construction time, or you can bind’em later using the parseHtml call.

The id specified in the addTable calls was also used to bind a Table to the related html snippet. The same binding is now obtained specifiyng such id in the constructor of the Grid.

The logic behind showValues is now changed and moved into the new updateRow function.

The html templates need some adjustments too. Search for our custom html properties and rename them as follows:

table becomes data-grid

item becomes data-item

row becomes data-row

field becomes data-field

source becomes data-source

note that their values remain the same.

If you were using elements different from <div> <span> and <input> in the template of a Dyna*Table you have to add a setNodeTypes call to the new DynaGrid instance passing in an array of strings containing the name of the elements used or the grid will not recognize the cells (e.g.: myGrid.setNodeTypes(["td","p"])).

Callbacks
We’ve moved from a “define a function on one of our objects to be internally called as a callback” model to an “add a listener that receives events” model.
The big plus of this change is the possibility to have different handlers for the same event.

Take a look to the following example to quickly understand how to move from one model to the other:

Old Code
pushPage.onStatusChange = function(newStatus) {
//do stuff with newStatus
};

New Code
lsClient.addListener({
onStatusChange: function(newStatus) {
//do stuff with newStatus
}
});

Per each addListener call in the APIs a related *Listener interface is defined. Note that you only need to define the events you want to be notified on, no need to implement the whole interface.

QUICK ACTION: search all the callbacks you defined on our objects and substitute with addListener calls as shown in the above example. Note that some callbacks may have different names; as an example onStart is now called onSubscription, other callbacks have been moved, as an example the onServerDeny callback from PushPage is now the onSubscriptionError of the SubscriptionListener.

NOTE: if you were using the this keyword in your callbacks implementation you’ll have to change your code: previously such this would refer to the attached instance while now refers to the *Listener instance. Be careful.

Subjects Not Covered
Even after following this guide you may still have doubts about how to correctly port something. That’s fine, I appreciate I would need to write a complete book to cover all the differences between the old and the new APIs, so drop us a line here or on our forum and we’ll help you to sort out any remaining porting issues.

Dynamic Bandwidth and Frequency Management

2012-09-05T16:24:00.000+02:00

If you have been knowing Lightstreamer for a long time, you appreciate that it has always been particularly good at managing the bandwidth used by the stream connection and the individual update rate of each subscription.

In addition to heuristically spot network congestions and adapting the data flow automatically, Lightstreamer has always offered an API call to dynamically change the maximum bandwidth granted to a given stream session.

The good news is that now both Lightstreamer 4.1 and 5.0 allow you to change the maximum frequency granted to each individual subscription on the fly.

The best way to illustrate this is through a demo. Just go to lightstreamer.com/demo/BandwidthDemo to see the new feature in action.

You will see the classic Stock-List Demo, where 15 simulated stocks push their live market data to the browser via Lightstreamer. The demo starts in "unlimited" mode, where neither the bandwidth nor the update frequency are limited. This means that the data pass through Lightstreamer and reach the browser based on the actual updates originated by the back-end data feed, only subjected to possible conflation in case of network issues or high latency on the physical link.

What you can do with Lightstreamer is allocate a maximum bandwidth to that session and have the data flow resampled and conflated dynamically to respect the limit. Move the Max Bandwidth slider to the left, perhaps to a value as ridiculous as 0.5 kilobits per seconds! Lightstreamer will still be able to deliver updates to the page, thanks to the very optimized network protocol used. Notice that when a row has a chance to be updated (based on a round-robin algorithm), it will receive the latest available values, not aged data. This happens thanks to "MERGE" subscription mode, where the updates are not queued and delayed, but resampled and conflated, without sacrificing data coherency and consistency. Other subscription modes, with different behaviors, are available.

But what happens exactly under the hood in the demo? When you move the Max Bandwidth, the client will notify the server of the new bandwidth and the server will change the update rate on the fly, in order to respect the bandwidth limit. Usually, bandwidth allocation is done on the server side directly, based on the user profile. But this demos gives the final user the possibility of changing their own bandwidth. Any change is always validated by server-side code (within the Metadata Adapter), which can allow or deny the bandwidth change.

Now let's move to the second slider. The Max Frequency slider sets the maximum update rate of each item in the subscription. Again, the client will notify the server of the new frequency limit and the server will change the update frequency on the fly, in order to respect the frequency limit. If you set "0.5 updates/second per item", each row in the table will not receive more than one update every two seconds, independently of the allocated bandwidth.

Bandwidth Management and Frequency Management are two independent tools, combined by Lightstreamer, which you can leverage to optimized the user's experience based on a number of variables. The cool thing is that you can apply any bandwidth and frequency change on the fly to an existing sessions and subscription, without requiring you to re-open a session to change its bandwidth or to re-subscribe to an item to change its update frequency. This makes dynamic changes in settings extremely fast. Imagine a scenario where your iPad application shows a summary of mixed real-time data, which can be drilled down. When the user clicks to get a detailed view of a piece of data, you might want to increase its max update frequency (perhaps 5 times per second instead on 1 per second). You can achieve that via a single API call and without interrupting the data flow. If you had to change subscription to move to the detail page, you would introduce some latency, especially on mobile networks, which would impact on the user's experience.

To know more on how to manage bandwidth and frequency, please check out the source code of the above demo, as explained at lightstreamer.com/demos#BandwidthDemo

Let us know if you have any question or feedback!

Meet our Partners - Markets Pulse

2012-08-31T15:25:00.000+02:00

A short interview with Ravit Friedberg, Product Manager of Markets Pulse, an Enterprise Binary Option technology provider for online trading companies.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Markets Pulse provides financial companies with advanced binary options technology, offering a great addition to any online trading platform. The offering includes easy-to-integrate back office and technologically advanced front-end trading platforms. The technology is installed completely on-site, providing confidentiality of data and a customizable trading experience. Working with regulated companies such as FxTrade Financial and Gallant Capital Markets, the technology is also ready for regulation.

Could you let us know any further information? (Number of customers, covered regions, revenues..)

Markets Pulse has representative offices in the United States, Singapore, Japan and Israel and about 65 employees at its service. Our mother company is Jivy Group, an Israel-based technology company with extensive resources, and we support clients and traders across the globe.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

The Markets Pulse technology is mostly used by brokers and other financial companies with an existing customer base, who utilize it to cross-sell their traders to this highly profitable trading product. These companies also require that this new offering works with their existing infrastructure. Markets Pulse is made for this situation; our technology was designed to seamlessly integrate with existing systems.

Markets Pulse is an Application Partner of Weswit (for Lightstreamer). For what customers have you already deployed Lightstreamer?

We deploy Lightstreamer as an integrated part of our trading platforms and, as such, all our clients use the advanced Lightstreamer technology.

What does your application or service do?

Markets Pulse is an Enterprise Binary Options Technology suite, which financial companies use to offer Binary Options to their clients without having to develop their own technology. The complete Markets Pulse suite is installed on-site; it seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure and consists of intuitive front-end trading platforms and an extensive back office.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

The Markets Pulse platform relies on Lightstreamer technology to distribute real-time financial quotes to all of the supported trading platforms: web, mobile devices and tablets. Real-time financial quotes are key to ensuring a dynamic trading experience for binary options traders.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

The Markets Pulse trading platform is built using the latest .NET 4 technology with WCF communications and a mixture of Javascript, ASP, HTML5 and Flash on the front end.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Yes, the Markets Pulse Mobile platform is one of the only binary options mobile trading technologies that are native on both Android and Apple platforms. In part, the superior user experience is due to the reliable, low latency pricing pushed based on Lightstreamer technology.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

At this time, Markets Pulse chiefly uses Lightstreamer technology to effectively and efficiently distribute real-time financial quotes to a variety of platforms.

A concluding question for Rachely Esman (CEO of Markets Pulse) about Lightstreamer technology and its support team. We would be very grateful if you would like to provide a short recommendation to testify your experience. What benefits are you obtaining?

[Rachely Esman] The Lightstreamer application allows us to offer the kind of secure, scalable and reliable experience our enterprise financial customers need. Our cooperation with Weswit and the usage of their technology has played a large role in our leadership in the competitive Binary Option technology market.

Meet our Customers: CanDeal.Ca

2012-08-24T11:29:00.000+02:00

A short interview with Joe D'Alessandro, CTO of CanDeal.Ca, the leading electronic marketplace for Canadian dollar debt securities.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

CanDeal provides institutional market participants with an electronic marketplace for Canadian dollar debt securities. Currently we operate in Canada, US and Europe with 200+ Institutional investors and 13 investment dealers.

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

Bond and Money Market traders and sales people at institutional investors: asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, central banks, etc. and investment dealers (all of Canada’s primary dealers)

What does your application or service do?

CanDeal facilitates electronic trading of Canadian dollar debt securities. Institutional investors from around the globe leverage CanDeal to gain direct access to the liquidity of our dealer network.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Initially, Lightstreamer will be used to drive real-time spreadsheets for both buy and sell side users. The platform will also be used to drive enhanced functionality to the CanDeal website and any other websites looking for CanDeal data, CanDeal’s new broadcast data feed, mobile strategy and a closing prices product.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

The trading application is C++ client.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Not currently.

Do you use Lightstreamer for bi-directional data push (that is, also for sending messages from the client to the server)?

Yes, Lightstreamer will be used for bi-directional data push.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

No other features are contemplated at this time.

Lightstreamer in a PhoneGap app

2012-08-10T16:16:00.000+02:00

As a JavaScript guy and mostly-OS-agnostic kind of person I wait for the day when I will be able to fully exploit the power of ApplicationCache and other new JS APIs such as GeoLocation and IndexedDB, to install the same web application and have the same OS-integrated experience on my Windows notebook, my Sabayon box or on my Android Smartphone. Not to mention the pleasure of sharing the exact same app with my iOS, Windows Phone or Tizen oriented friends.

Also, as a developer, not having to develop a native application per each OS out there would be a big plus.

Unfortunately today is not that day, so, if I want to deploy an application on each and any OS, giving my users a “native experience”, I have to write a native application per each of them. Right? Not exactly.

At least in the mobile world PhoneGap comes to the rescue making it possible to create a pure HTML+CSS+JS application and having it packed as a native application for all of the major mobile systems.
Using their online building tool (namely PhoneGap:Build) you don’t even need to setup a development environment per each target OS as it was previously necessary: simply prepare your code, upload it to their website and download the packed applications, that’s it!

The best part is, you can now use the Lightstreamer JavaScript Client 6 and its companion Lightstreamer Server 5 to enable real-time goodness on you PhoneGap application.

So, let’s try it!

Coding

PhoneGap offers a sample application to get you started and we’ll use it as our starting point. We’ll add some stock quotes from our classic StockListDemo and a box to show the status of the connection to the Lightstreamer Server.

As we will not use all of the classes from the Lightstreamer JS Client let’s start by customizing it via our generator tool: select LightstreamerClient, Subscription and DynaGrid, then choose the “Use globals” option and generate the lib. (note that you can use the AMD version too, we just want to avoid including an AMD loader in this simple example).

Once the generated library is saved as assets/js/lightstreamer.js and included in the index.html file we can start coding

<script src="assets/js/lightstreamer.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

First of all I adapted a little bit the application to avoid the use of the ids of the “button” elements as "command orders", I added a new navigation button and related section that will contain the Lightstreamer grid and edited the config.xml to add references to Lightstreamer. I will skip the details about these parts as not relevant here.

Then I added some Lightstreamer code to the application. I wanted my application to be always connected to a Lightstreamer server, so I included my connection logic in the callback sent to the run method in the app.js file. Such run method, declared in the dsl.js file, will execute the given callback as soon as PhoneGap is ready.

For such connection to be opened simply instantiate a LightstreamerClient object, specifying the server address and the adapter-set to be used, and call the connect function. In this case I also added a listener to my LightstreamerClient: each time the connection status will change it will be reported in the “connection_status” <div> element I added to the html page.

in the app.js file:

run(function () {
[...]
  var lsClient = new LightstreamerClient("http://push.lightstreamer.com","DEMO");
  lsClient.addListener({
onStatusChange: function(newStatus) {
   x$("#connection_status").html(newStatus);
}
});
lsClient.connect();

in the index.html page:

<div id="connection_status">DISCONNECTED</div>

Once connected we need to subscribe to our stock data and we also want a grid to show such data.

I included a DynaGrid template in the html page in the form of a <li> element (notice the id of the <li> element, the data-source and the data-field properties) and then created the related JS code.
A listener of the DynaGrid instance will take care of configuring the highlighting of the cells. We also want the grid to be sorted on the stock_name field.

in the index.html page:

<li id="stocks" data-source="lightstreamer">
<span class="stock_name" data-source="lightstreamer" data-field="stock_name"></span>
  <span class="last_price" data-source="lightstreamer" data-field="last_price"></span>
</li>

in the app.js file:

var grid = new DynaGrid("stocks",true);
grid.setSort("stock_name");
grid.addListener({
  onVisualUpdate: function(key,info) {
  if (info == null) {
return; //cleaning
}
info.setHotTime(500);
info.setHotToColdTime(300);
  info.setAttribute("#F7941E", "transparent", "backgroundColor");
info.setAttribute("white", "black", "color");
}
});

I created and configured a Subscription, added the previously created grid as a listener for its updates and subscribed to to the Lightstreamer Server through the LightstreamerClient.
I could have specified the list of fields to be subscribed to manually but in this case I preferred to read such list from my grid template; extending the template with a new cell for a different field will automatically expand the list of subscribed fields. Also extending the list of items to be subscribed to will make the grid grow vertically.

var sub = new Subscription("MERGE",["item3","item4","item5","item6","item7"],grid.extractFieldList());
sub.addListener(grid);
sub.setDataAdapter("QUOTE_ADAPTER");
sub.setRequestedSnapshot("yes");
lsClient.subscribe(sub);

That’s it!
The full source code of the application shown here is available on my GitHub account; go to https://github.com/Mone/phonegap-start and check it out.

Building

Now that the application code is ready we have to build it, head for the previously cited PhoneGap:Build and login: you can use an Adobe ID or a GitHub account to authenticate on the site, if you have none you’ll have to create one (my personal suggestion is to pick the GitHub option).

After the first login PhoneGap asks to create an application; simply fill the name input box for the application and the address of your (or mine) GitHub project, sit and wait, your application is being built!

Hey! What about Websockets?

The Lightstreamer JS library will open a WebSocket to a Lightstreamer Server if a WebSocket implementation is made available by the hosting platform.

In this case the library counts on PhoneGap for such implementation to be available. PhoneGap in turn relies on the hosting OS's browser for the WebSocket class to be available so that, by default, as of today, you will not get a WebSocket connection on most phones.

Obviously the Lightstreamer JavaScript Client will resort to HTTP-STREAMING if Web Sockets are not available on the platform: when using Lightstreamer you never have to worry, we got your back.

Note: a WebSocket implementation can be injected into PhoneGap via plugin but it will be OS dependant. Note that for the implementation to play nice with Lightstreamer Server it has to adhere to RFC 6455.

Don’t like PhoneGap and/or JavaScript development?

If you still prefer pure-native apps, we offer Lightstreamer client libraries for a plethora of technologies; talking about the mobile world we offer SDKs for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and J2ME-enabled devices. Also our protocol is fully documented so you can potentially use Lightstreamer on any device.

Lightstreamer 5.0 Colosseo is now available!

2012-08-03T14:26:00.000+02:00

We are very thrilled to announce that the final release of Lightstreamer 5.0, codename Colosseo, is now generally available for download.

Lightstreamer 5.0 includes full support for WebSockets, a brand new JavaScript client API, impressive performance boost, and many new features.

WebSocket Support

The WebSocket protocol is a new Web standard that enables bidirectional, full-duplex communication over the Web. Lightstreamer 5.0 provides a rock-solid implementation of the WebSocket standard. Even if WebSockets are not yet universally supported by the browsers and the network infrastructure, the Stream-Sense algorithm of Lightstreamer is able to automatically choose the best transport among the many available (WS, HTTP Streaming, HTTP Long Polling, and their different flavors), for each connection. This means that real-time bidirectional communication will work smoothly in every case, even when connected via very invasive proxies and firewalls and when using older browsers (including IE 6). Among the many transports supported by Lightstreamer, there is even "polling over WebSockets"... Yes, it might sound odd, but there exist rare cases where you would prefer using polling rather than streaming even over WebSockets. For a historical perspective on Lightstreamer and WebSockets, see a previous article.

New JavaScript Client API

On the client side, a completely redesigned JavaScript API is available. The new library is much easier to use, much faster, and represents the first implementation of the Lightstreamer Unified Client API. The other client libraries will follow the same interface in the future, so that switching languages and platforms (e.g. from JavaScript to Objective-C, or from Java to .NET) will be extremely easy. The new JavaScript API, version 6, is based on AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) and RequireJS, the de facto standard for modularization and loading of JS libraries. This implies that it is now possible to include only the objects that are actually used by your application, rather than having to include the full library. For this purpose, a generator tool is available for on-the-fly creation of custom versions of the JS library. As the resulting lib is a single file, you don’t need to include anymore a set of different JS and HTML resources as in previous versions of Lightstreamer.

There is now full support for cross-origin connections, so that in most cases you don’t have to use the same domain name for the Web server and the Lightstreamer server.

The new JS library has is compatible with "out-of-browser" JavaScript applications, resulting in the possibility of leveraging Lightstreamer inside any JavaScript-based platforms, including Node.js and PhoneGap. For example, you can now use the Lightstreamer JS API inside your Node.js application to get real-time data from Lightstreamer Server with few lines of code. Source-code examples for both Node.js and PhoneGap are included in the distribution.

The new Stream-Sense algorithm is much faster, with impressive performance boost on session start up. The connection to Lightstreamer Server will be established in a fraction of the time it took with previous versions.

A brand new logging and error management facility has been implemented in the library, as well as new ready-made widgets (a new status indicator and new data grids).

Among the other released features, we should mention the possibility of changing the max frequency of a subscription on the fly. In other words, you can subscribe to an item and change the resampling frequency without having to unsubscribe and resubscribe.

Improved Server

Even if Lightstreamer Server has a long history of successful production deployment, we keep improving the code, as this is the base of our philosophy.

With Lightstreamer Server 5.0 the performance has been boosted even more, in terms of increased scalability and reduced latency. Lightstreamer can be easily deployed in a cloud and take benefit from both horizontal and vertical scalability.

Many new features and improvements have been added, such as:

new support for TLS/SSL renegotiation
heartbeat randomization for bursty broadcast traffic
easier and more explicit error messages
new install scripts for Linux and better service support for Windows
automatic update check for new versions of Lightstreamer
new easier licenses (Lightstreamer Moderato comes with an embedded Free license, without requiring registration anymore; Lightstreamer Allegro/Presto/Vivace come with an embedded Demo license, again without requiring registration)
...and much more!

Make sure you check out the detailed changelog to learn about all the changes to Lightstreamer Server and to the Client and Adapter APIs.

How to Get Lightstreamer 5.0 Colosseo

Just go the download page and choose the Lightstreamer edition to download (between Moderato and Allegro/Presto/Vivace). Then refer to the README.TXT and GETTING_STARTED.TXT notes to know how to install or upgrade the server. To use Lightstreamer Moderato, you don't need to get a license key anymore. Lightstreamer Allegro/Presto/Vivace runs in Demo mode without a license key, allowing a maximum of 20 concurrent users.

In the meantime, we keep working on new features! So expect more exciting releases soon.

(Photo courtesy of Antonio Pastorino)

Meet our Customers: FINODEX BV

2012-07-24T16:18:00.000+02:00

A short interview with Herbert Robijn, Founder and Managing Director of FINODEX, a Dutch company that builds investment tools.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

Web-based investment tools for equities, options, and leveraged products (e.g. Turbo's).

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

B2B: banks, brokers and financial portals who provide our tools white labeled to their retail clients. B2C: we sell our tools via direct channel.

What does your application or service do?

We provide Smart Investment Tools to help investors make better investment decisions.

What functionalities are powered by Lightstreamer?

Lightstreamer is used for streaming our market data and analytics to client front-end.

Is your main application based on HTML or other front-end technologies?

Javascript and PHP.

Do you provide any native apps for smartphones and tablets?

Yes, we created Apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry (e.g. MobileQuotes App). We will consider to stream market data and analytics to mobile devices too.

Do you use Lightstreamer for bi-directional data push (that is, also for sending messages from the client to the server)?

No, not yet.

Click on the image to enlarge

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?

None of the above yet. We just started to use your technology to push our streaming calculations and analytics to our front-end.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?

Check out www.finodex.com, http://www.telegraaf.nl/dft/DFTBeleggersTools/ and tools.iex.nl.

Any comments on your experience integrating Lightstreamer?

Adapting Lightstreamer to push our streaming analytics was a no-brainer. Implementation went very smoothly and our clients are now able to make full use of streaming real-time analytics.

Start Me Up!

2012-05-24T10:06:00.002+02:00

No, we are not talking about the old, amazing Rolling Stones Song. We are just enthusiastic to introduce the Startup Program, a way Weswit can provide promising new businesses with Lightstreamer technology at an exceptionally generous rate.

We are more than sure that smart tools are mandatory requirements to transform a good idea into a great success. Many promising start-ups need real-time data streaming for their ideas to take off, but they simply can't afford the additional investment in the early stages. We think that if some companies are given the chance to thrive, we can thrive with them: that's why we decided to offer Lightstreamer only to a few, valuable start-ups every year.

Being admitted to the Startup Program means that any edition and configuration of Lightstreamer can be used for any purpose, including production and development, with no limitations, for a maximum period of eighteen months, including full support and maintenance. Any company with less than one million Euros in annual revenue or any new company in its first fiscal year can qualify.

All desktop and mobile technologies are fully supported, including HTML, JavaScript, iOS, Android, Flex, Silverlight, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Java, and .NET.

The Startup Program rocks! Read all the details now.