Lightstreamer 5.1.2 Released

A maintenance release of Lightstreamer is now publicly available for download. It contains several fixes and improvements.

For paid editions, no license updates are necessary to upgrade, provided that a license for server 5.1 and JS client 6.1 is already in use and the maintenance contract is active.

Please contact support@lightstreamer.com if you have any questions.

Below is a list of the changed components.

Developing Swift Apps on iOS with Lightstreamer

Unless you have been living under a rock in the last month or so, you should know Apple introduced a new programming language during WWDC 2014. Like a typical Steve Jobs' "One more thing" move, Craig Federighi introduced Swift at the very end of the keynote. The intention of the new language is to leave behind some of the C legacy that burdens Objective-C.

So far, Swift has been welcomed by developers and has generated a lot of articles in popular platforms like Stack Overflow. The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing popularity of the language with some sample code to connect, subscribe and send messages to Lightstreamer. 

The code presented here has been written and tested with Xcode 6.0 beta3 and the Lightstreamer iOS client 1.3 (due to be released shortly), but it is compatible with client version 1.2.x (released with Server 5.x).

If you prefer a complete example, in place of a step by step tutorial, take a look at the iOS Swift Chat demo. More informations at the end of the article.

Exploiting Static Exception Checking in Asynchronous Java Code

Hierarchical exception handling and static exception checking are among the most significant features offered by the Java language; however, their support is limited to procedural code and can only be exploited in hierarchies of function calls. So, there is nothing similar to assist us when it comes to event-driven programming or asynchronous programming, where the work is scattered among many functions that are independent from one another. This is particularly frustrating in some architectures, where the logical design is strictly hierarchical and the control flow is actually sequential, but asynchronous API calls are involved.
The present article deals with the latter case; we show how, by writing code that follows a specific pattern and leans on a suitable support library, the benefits of hierarchical exception handling and static exception checking can be achieved. This technique was applied in some parts of Lightstreamer Server with proficiency.

Meet Our Customers: TOK.tv

We talked with Fabrizio Capobianco, Founder and CEO of TOK.tv, the company behind an innovative Lightstreamer-powered second screen application. TOK.tv apps allow people to talk with friends while watching sports events like FIFA World Cup on TV. We recently discussed about TOK apps here, and showed how they work here.

Fabrizio is a true industry veteran and serial entrepreneur. As an advisory board member at M31 USA and Mind the Bridge Foundation, he is helping Italian tech startups to succeed in Silicon Valley. In 1995 he launched and lead to success Internet Graffiti, the first Italian Web Company, developing many Internet projects and web sites as CTO. Besides TOK.tv, Fabrizio is in charge as President and Chairman of Funambol, which he founded in 2003 and guided to be one of the leading personal cloud companies in the world. He cooperated with Wireless magazine in writing the "Wireless Valley" column, among many other things.