🔥Introducing Lightstreamer Kafka Connector!

We are thrilled to announce the latest addition to the Lightstreamer family: the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector, now available to you at no additional cost!

As many of you are aware, the Apache Kafka® platform is the industry standard for distributed event streaming, used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies. It excels in creating high-performance data pipelines, for streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications, handling vast volumes of data with unmatched throughput and reliability.

However, Kafka faces challenges in the "last mile" of data delivery—direct streaming to end-users, especially through firewalls and proxies, traversing unreliable networks, and scaling to large numbers of concurrent connections. Essentially, Kafka was not built with the public internet in mind.

Enter the Lightstreamer Kafka Connector. This tool bridges the gap, merging Lightstreamer's legendary streaming capabilities with Kafka’s robust infrastructure, delivering a seamless solution in perfect synergy. Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Intelligent Streaming & Adaptive Throttling: Optimize the data flow with smart bandwidth management, automatic data conflation, and delta delivery.
• Massive Scalability: Connect millions of clients without compromising performance.
• Firewall & Proxy Traversal: Deliver real-time data to clients anywhere, overcoming network barriers.
• Comprehensive Client API Support: Includes fully supported SDKs for web, Android, iOS, Python, Java, Flutter, .NET, Node.js, and more!
• Extensive Broker Compatibility: Compatible with leading brokers such as Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, Redpanda, Aiven, and others.

Enabling Real-Time Data Streaming on Apple Vision Pro with Lightstreamer for visionOS

The landscape of spatial computing is advancing with significant strides, and at the forefront is Apple’s Vision Pro headset, a remarkable innovation powered by the newly introduced visionOS. This operating system, revealed at WWDC 2023, is Apple's latest venture into the realm of augmented and virtual reality, bringing a new level of immersion and interactivity to the user experience.

Lightstreamer 7.4.0 and New SDKs

We are thrilled to announce a momentous new release of Lightstreamer, encompassing both the Lightstreamer Server and all the Lightstreamer Client SDKs and Adapter SDKs. This significant update introduces groundbreaking features and improvements, enhancing the overall performance and functionality of Lightstreamer.

Introducing the Lightstreamer Flutter plugin

We recently introduced the Lightstreamer Flutter plugin to respond to the increasing requests dictated by the incredible success that the Flutter framework for creating multi-platform applications has been encountering for some years now.

You can find the plugin in the official package repository for Dart and Flutter apps: https://pub.dev/packages/lightstreamer_flutter_client 

Discover Lightstreamer 7.3

 

We are proud to announce that Lightstreamer 7.3 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 7.3 and the most recent client and adapter SDKs bring many improvements and fixes, mainly covering performance and features. Below are some highlights but you can check out the full list in the Server changelog and the changelogs of the various SDKs, that can be reached from the download page.

Lightstreamer Server 7.2 Released

We are delighted to announce that Lightstreamer 7.2 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 7.2 and the most recent client and adapter SDKs bring many improvements and fixes, mainly covering performance and features. This, in many aspects, completes the renovation work started with Lightstreamer 7.0. Below are some highlights but you can check out the full list in the changelog.

Introducing support for Swift Package Manager and Apple Silicon

The latest version of our client SDKs for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS, version 4.3.0, is now distributed via Swift Package Manager and includes support for Apple Silicon Macs.

At the same time, with this version, we are dismissing CocoaPods as a package manager. The last version available on CocoaPods is and always will be version 4.2.1.

Read on for a quick How-To on switching from CocoaPods to SPM.

Lightstreamer Web Client 8.1.0-beta

We have started the beta testing of the new Lightstreamer Web Client library, v. 8.1.0.

The main difference with the previous version is in the connection setup mechanism, also known as stream-sense. With version 8.1.0, instead of creating a session over HTTP and then switching to WebSocket, a session is created directly over WebSocket, while preserving the ability to fall back to HTTP. This means that in most cases, clients are able to set up the streaming channel with one connection only instead of two, reducing the session initiation time and overhead.

The new beta library is available on npm and you can test it in non-production environments.

Please get back to us for any feedback and questions.

Lightstreamer Server 7.1.2

We are happy to announce that Lightstreamer Server v. 7.1.2 is now publicly available.

You can download it, as usual, from https://lightstreamer.com/download/

This new distribution does not contain the Lightstreamer SDKs anymore. With time passing, every SDK has found its own home within standard repositories, depending on the platform. So, it makes no more sense to bundle them with the Server distribution. For example, the JavaScripts libs are available on npm, the Java libs on Maven, etc. You can find all the links on the same download page.

Furthermore, Lightstreamer Server v. 7.1.2 contains some minor fixes and improvements (check out the changelog).

New Lightstreamer .NET Standard Client v.5.0.0 Now Available

We are very excited to announce the availability of a brand new Lightstreamer client API for Microsoft .NET Standard specifications.

What's new

The new library introduces full support for the Unified Client API model, which we have been introducing in all Lightstreamer client libraries for some years now (indeed the first "Unified" library was JavaScript 6.0). The big advantage of using the Unified API is the same consistent interface and behavior are guaranteed across different client platforms. In other words, the same abstractions and internal mechanisms are provided for very different platforms (Web, Android, Java, iOS, .NET, Node.js, etc.), while respecting the conventions, styles, and best practice of each platform.

The New Features in Lightstreamer 7.1

We are extremely proud to announce the public availability of Lightstreamer 7.1, the best Lightstreamer ever!

Together with Lightstreamer Server 7.1, we released updated SDKs for Clients and Adapters.

This release contains hundreds of exciting improvements, optimizations, and fixes. Some of the main new features are highlighted below. To learn about all the other improvements and fixes, please go through the complete changelog.

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.

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.

Version 3.0.0 of iOS, macOS and tvOS SDKs Now Out of Beta

After a month of beta testing, we released the final version of our SDKs for iOS, macOS and tvOS version 3.0.0.

Version 3.0.0 introduces:

• Support for WebSockets.
• Revised API documentation.
• Improved cookie handling. 

Check the beta introductory article for full details and examples.

The new SDKs are available through CocoaPods or via direct download, as usual. Native demo projects on GitHub and on the App Store have also been updated to version 3.0.0 of the client library. Check them out.

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

New 3.0.0 beta SDKs for iOS, macOS and tvOS

We have recently released a new version of the SDKs for iOS, macOS and tvOS: 3.0.0 beta.

This version introduces a new major feature: support for WebSockets, together with a completely revised documentation and a plethora of minor improvements and bug fixes.

See below for more details.

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

Welcome, Kotlin!

Google recently made Kotlin an official application development language for Android. We are very excited to announce that the new version of the Lightstreamer client API for Android embraces Kotlin. By ensuring full support for both Kotlin and Java, the library enables developers to choose their favorite programming language or even mix them.

What's New With Lightstreamer 6.1

We are very excited to announce general availability of Lightstreamer Server 6.1, which includes many new features and improvements.

Lightstreamer now speaks a brand new protocol, called TLCP. The Android and Java SE client libraries use the new protocol and natively support WebSockets. The iOS client library has become more Swift-friendly. A new client library is available for Microsoft .NET PCL, replacing older .NET, Windows Phone, and WinRT libs. In addition, several fixes and optimizations have been added to most components.

It's super easy to check out Lightstreamer 6.1. You can either download the installation package, or run the official Docker image, or launch the official AWS AMI.