Lightstreamer and Xamarin - a New version of Our Stock-List Demo

Xamarin, or more precisely Xamarin.Forms, is a cross-platform UI toolkit that allows developers to efficiently create native user interface layouts that can be shared across iOS, Android, and Universal Windows Platform apps.

Here at Lightstreamer we decided to create a new demo that, leveraging our .Net Standard Client API and Xamarin.Forms, shows how simple is, with very few lines of code, to create an application that displays full real-time data. The same code base can then be used to build iOS, Android, and UWP apps.

Meet Our Customers: ActivTrades

An interview with Rosen Mehanov, Senior Developer at ActivTrades. Rosen will explain the architecture of ActivTrades' trading platform and how Lightstreamer powers real-time data push.

ActivTrades is a well known online broker focused on FX, CFDs, and Spread Betting. May you please provide any further details on your business and offering?

Founded in 2001 as a small brokerage house, ActivTrades rapidly developed into an award-winning global derivatives broker for retail and institutional clients.
Our clients enjoy benefits associated with the fact that ActivTrades:

Data Streaming vs. Push Notifications

When dealing with mobile apps, the difference between real-time data streaming and push notifications is not always clear to everybody. Let's try to delve into this topic.

1. With data streaming, the server sends real-time data directly to the app, leveraging WebSockets and/or HTTP. This requires the app to be running and, with iOS, to be in foreground.
    
2. With push notifications, the server sends messages to Google's and Apple's servers, which deliver them to the mobile devices. Notifications are received by the device even if the app that subscribed to them is not in foreground or is not even running.

Lightstreamer 7.0 Released

We are delighted to announce that Lightstreamer 7 has been publicly released.

You can download it right now from https://www.lightstreamer.com/download/

The official Docker image and the Amazon EC2 AMI are available too.

Lightstreamer 7 and the client SDKs include hundreds of improvements and fixes, covering performance, features, compatibility, and licensing. This makes Lightstreamer more solid and faster than ever. Below are some highlights but you can check out the full list in the change log.

New watchOS SDK Now Available

If you are one of our customers (and if you are not, what are you waiting for?), you know the Lightstreamer company is customer driven. Whenever a customer requests a new feature, we do all we can to comply.

So, when a customer asked us if we had a watchOS Client Library on the roadmap, during Fall 2017, we scheduled it for Q1 2018. Now, we are happy to announce it is available and ready for integration in your WatchKit extensions.

The new watchOS SDK derives from the iOS SDK version 4.0.0 and retains the same version number. It includes all the APIs and features of the iOS SDK, with the single exception of WebSocket support (due to limitations of the watchOS platform).

Let's dig into some examples.

Note: if you need download and example pointers, jump directly to the end of the post ("Get the SDK").

Cloud License Manager

Starting from Lightstreamer 7, a new license verification mechanism has been introduced, called Cloud License Manager (CLM). With CLM, licensing happens online, with no more need for license files bound to the MAC address of the hosting machine. The increase in flexibility is tremendous.

Switching to the New Lightstreamer 7 Editions

For the last few years, Lightstreamer has been organized into four different editions, which got their names from Italian musical tempo terms, namely Moderato, Allegro, Presto, and Vivace. Now, with the upcoming release of Lightstreamer 7, the editions are going to change, to offer maximum flexibility to our customers.

In this post, we will explain how the old editions map onto the new ones for existing customers.

Mobile Push Notifications with Lightstreamer Server 7.0 and Client SDKs 4.0

With the upcoming release of Lightstreamer 7.0, and its beta 2 already available for you to test, Mobile Push Notifications APIs jump on the Unified Client API model with SDKs version 4.0, employing a new asynchronous model and delivering all the latest features of iOS and Android push notifications.

In this blog post we take a look at the new APIs, with code examples and use cases for both Objective-C and Java.

Note: if you need download and example pointers, jump directly to the end of the post ("Get the SDKs").