Real-time Business Analytics Using Dojo and Lightstreamer

(Below is a re-post from the SitePen Blog)

The proliferation of online data gives businesses more information than they can possibly manage. Real-time dashboards and trading systems help users make sense of financial information, analytics, business trends, customer stats, and much more. The Dojo Toolkit and Lightstreamer are two popular choices available for building your own platforms and applications.

Lightstreamer 4.0 Preview Release

We are very excited to announce early availability of the Preview Release of next-generation Lightstreamer.

The final release is expected in the next few months, but this sneak preview will allow you to check out some of the improvements to the product and enable us to collect your precious feedback before releasing the final version.

We encourage you to download and test the Preview Release and get back to us with any comments.

Season's Greetings from Lightstreamer

The Lightstreamer team wishes you health, happiness, and success in 2011 and always!

The new year will bring many important news for Lightstreamer, including a new major release of the software. Lightstreamer Server 4.0 will add new features and performance improvements. All the Client APIs will get important updates too. And we will add even more specific client APIs for all the major mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7.

We might decide to make a first preview release available in January. Please let us know if you are interested in checking it out, by writing to support@lightstreamer.com.

All the best,

The Lightstreamer Engineering and Support Team

Use RTD to Push Data to Excel via Lightstreamer

Real-Time Data (RTD) is a technology introduced in Microsoft Excel starting from version 2002, aimed at replacing DDE for updating spreadsheets in real time.

It is possible to use Lightstreamer to push real-time data through the Internet and then inject it into an Excel spreadsheet via RTD.

We have just released a demo, together with full source code, that shows this possibility.

NASA Spacecraft Telemetry

Lightstreamer has been procured by NASA Mission Operations Directorate via Lockheed Martin. The Mission Operations Directorate is evaluating the product for distribution of real-time spacecraft telemetry data. [Read the press release]

Telemetry is a kind of application where being able to push real-time data through the Internet, to any web browsers and smartphones, is a new fundamental feature.

The "Push Paradigm" (also know as "Comet") originated in the Financial Serivces industry, where Lightstreamer was the very first solution, back in 2000, that was able to update stock market prices in real-time using only html and javascript. Now, more and more application domains are taking benefit from this paradigm, including aerospace, military, gaming, sporting, and entertainment.

Are you using Lightstreamer for anything other than Financial Services? Let us know on our forum.

Meta-Push, COMMAND Mode, and the New Flex Portfolio Demo

On of the advanced features of Lightstreamer that sometimes is not notice when first dealing with the product is COMMAND subscription mode. It is a very handy way of pushing not only changes to the data rows, but even changes to the table itself (in terms of adding and removing rows).

A typical example of this is a trading portfolio. You have a table with the list of stocks currently in your portfolio. The value of such stocks keep changing based on the market, so some columns keep being updated. At the same time, you may sell or buy some stocks, resulting in removing or adding rows to the table. You want such changes to be pushed to the front-end in real-time too. A nice example of this is the online Portfolio Demo.

New Excel Demo Available

Excel spreadsheets are often the main means used by professional traders to analyze data and make decisions. Being able to inject real-time data into Excel means boosting the capabilities of the traders.

We have hosted a Lightstreamer-to-Excel demo for a long time, but we never provided the source code. We have now reengineered such demo and published online together with full source code. This way, Lightstreamer developers will have a good starting point to implement their own Excel applications.

Android Demo Available

The Android operating system is spreading to more and more smartphones. Being able to deliver real-time updates to applications running on Android phones may be a crucial feature for many scenarios (from financial applications, to social and collaboration tools).

Lightstreamer is a perfect means to push data updates to any application/device connected to the Internet, including Android phones. For this reason, we have decided to release an Android example for Lightstreamer, together with full-source code.

This Android app, developed in Java, uses the Lightstreamer Java Client library to subscribe to 15 stock prices (as most of our typical "Stock-List Demos" do). The price updates are received in real-time, with very low latency, through a connection based on HTTP streaming.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) Demo Available

We have released a new Lightstreamer demo based on GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

A GWT FlexTable is used to display the real-time data pushed by Lightstreamer.

Full source code is provided, so that it will be easier to develop GWT applications that need to receive real-time data.

• Read more details
• See the online demo
• Download full source code

London Comet Panel Video

The full video of the Comet panel held in London on July 13th is now available.

The representatives from the main companies in the Comet (web push technology) space, including Lightstreamer, discuss their solutions and compare their positions.

New Java Swing Demo Available

We have released a new Lightstreamer demo based on a JavaSE Swing client, which replaces the old Java demo, for which no source code was available.

Visit us at SIFMA 2010 (New York)

Lightstreamer will have a booth at SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo 2010.

June 22-24, 2010
Hilton New York, New York City
Booth 1822

SIFMA’s 30th Annual Financial Services Technology Expo is the premier event focusing on technology in the financial services market. The Conference & Exhibit is the industry's leading event with over 300 vendors and 8,000 attendees. The conference will address the rapidly-changing world of technology and how the financial industry is using technology to drive productivity, comply with regulatory requirements, and adapt to converging markets, products and investors.

You will have a chance to meet both sales and technical representatives of Lightstreamer and know the latest news on state-of-the-art push technology.

New Patch Release Available

An upgrade to the Lightstreamer distributions is available for download.

The changes regard the Lightstreamer Server, the Flex Client SDK, and the Web Client SDK.

SHOULD YOU UPGRADE?

Upgrading is recommended in the three cases below:

"Implementing the Real-Time Web" - Video Now Available

In 2008, Alessandro Alinone (Lightstreamer's CTO) gave a talk in Bangalore (India) at the Great Indian Developer Summit, titled "Ajax and Comet: Implementing the Real-Time Web".

The video of the talk is now publicly available:

Tutorial on using Flex AMF with Lightstreamer

A new Lightstreamer tutorial has been published, covering the use of native Flex AMF objects, a new feature of Lightstreamer 3.6.

The tutorial shows how to push binary ActionScript objects directly to a Flex application in real-time, using AMF (Action Message Format), which is used for serializing binary ActionScript objects in order to transmit them over the wire).

Read the full tutorial.

Lightstreamer 3.6 is out!

I'm very happy to announce that we have publicly released updated versions of all the Lightstreamer components, with many improvements and new exciting features, including: the official Silverlight client, AMF support for the Flex client, efficient bidirectional push for the new faster JavaScript client, a new threading model for the Server, and much more.

After downloading the new package, please remember to get updated licenses. If you are a Moderato user, just generate a new license online. If you are an Allegro/Presto/Vivace user with a valid support contract, please get back to us.

SSL/TLS protocols renegotiation vulnerability (Lightstreamer is safe)

Very recently, a new vulnerability in the SSL and TLS protocols was discovered, which may allow attackers to execute an arbitrary HTTP transaction. It seems that many SSL/TLS libraries will need to be patched in order to prevent such vulnerability.

A global update on the issue is available from CERT.

We have checked the Lightstreamer Server code and we can confirm that Lightstreamer is not affected by this vulnerability.

JQuery Grid (jqGrid) Demo

We have released a very simple demo showing how to integrate Lightstreamer with JQuery Grid Plugin. jqGrid is a nice widget with many advanced features for creating and managing tables.

The integration is straightforward, based on a few lines of JavaScript code that act as a bridge between Lightstreamer and jqGrid.

Concrete Comet Examples

A new article, "Concrete Comet Examples", was published on Comet Daily, featuring some Lightstreamer widgets running live within the page.

The article summarizes and demonstrates three typical applications of the Comet paradigm: financial market data distribution, chats, and monitor consoles.

New Demo Gallery

I'm very happy to announce that we recently released a brand new demo gallery for Lightstreamer.

The online demo applications are grouped by client-side technology, based on the categories below:

• HTML & JavaScript
• Third-Party AJAX Frameworks
• Flash - Flex - AIR
• Silverlight
• .NET
• Java SE
• Java ME
• Others (Excel, iPhone)