NASA and Lightstreamer for Project Morpheus

NASA's Undergraduate Student Research Program site recently published an interesting paper by Matthew Noyes and Robert Hirsh: Rendering Flight Telemetry in Platform-Independent Three-Dimensional Touch-Interactive Simulations (PDF download).

The paper describes an innovative project where Lightstreamer is used for pushing spacecraft telemetry data to tablet devices, which render a 3D representation of the vehicle in real time.

Real-Time Forever...

With refreshed minds and bodies after summer vacation, the Lightstreamer team is working hard on several new exciting ideas. Lightstreamer will keep shaping the future of the real-time Web :-)

Make sure to follow us not only through this blog, but via the other social channels too. We post short updates on Twitter (@Lightstreamer) and propagate them to LinkedIn and Facebook. Find all the details here.

Lightstreamer Server 4.0.1 Released

A new update to Lightstreamer Server 4.0 is available for download.
The new version is 4.0.1 build 1513.1.3.

This release fixes a bug introduced with Lightstreamer 4.0 that affects HTTPS connections. Under some circumstances, when very large control requests are sent (usually due to very long item and field names, combined with high numbers of subscriptions) the underlying TLS/SSL connection may break.

Patch Release Available

We recently released an update to the latest distribution of Lightstreamer (codename Duomo, which contains Server 4.0 and HTML Client 5.0).

Such update, which is available from the usual download page, contains two changes:

Push Technology, Comet, and WebSockets: 10 years of history from Lightstreamer's perspective

By Alessandro Alinone (originally published on Comet Daily)

More than ten years have passed since the creation of Lightstreamer. Now that Lightstreamer 4.0 is generally available, it is a good moment to look back at what happened in the history of Push/Comet and to share a short analysis of the current trends from Lightstreamer’s perspective.

Lightstreamer 4.0 Released!

We are very proud to announce that the new version of Lightstreamer, codename Duomo, is now generally available.

New Lightstreamer contains many exciting improvements, making it the perfect solution whenever you need to deliver real-time messages through the Internet.

Performance has been improved, making Lightstreamer Server even more scalable and faster than before. It is now easier to manage the system, via the new logging facility and new JMX interface. Many stability and reliability improvements have been introduced across all the code.

Stream Real-Time Data to Mobile Apps

One of the tasks recently completed by the Lightstreamer engineering team has been to provide maximum support for all mobile platforms, so that any mobile app for any device could easily become real-time enabled.

The new release of Lightstreamer, codename Duomo, which will be publicly available next week, will contain a lot of exciting new features to extend the power of Lightstreamer's push to every mobile clients.

For each mobile platform, a dedicated full-blown SDK is provided, containing native libs, documentation, and source-code examples and demos. Supported platforms are: Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Java ME.

Lightstreamer has a New Logo

After ten years' great service, it was time to replace the Lightstreamer logo with a brand new one, more up to date and stylish.

New iPhone and iPad Lightstreamer Example

Next Lightstreamer version, codename Duomo, will have many new exciting features, including some brand new client APIs. We now directly cover all the mobile app technologies out there, including iOS. We have recently published on Apple Store a simple iOS application that is a good example of how to leverage the iOS Client API for Lightstreamer inside an Objective-C application.

Previously, to develop iOS applications that could receive real-time data from Lightstreamer Server you had to use a third-party client library. Now we provide our own officially supported API.

The new example, provided with full source code, shows a simple grid updated in real-time with market data generated by Lightstreamer Server. Such application automatically adapts to both iPhone and iPad.

Meet Lightstreamer in New York in June at SIFMA

Weswit will present the new version of Lightstreamer software, codename Duomo, at Financial Services Technology Expo 2011 (SIFMA) in New York.

Come and visit us at our booth! You will have a chance to speak to Weswit's co-CEO and CTO Alessandro Alinone and co-CEO and Chairman Mauro Fantechi.

Financial Services Technology Leaders Forum and Expo
June 14-16 2011
Hilton New York, 1335 Avenue of the Americas
Booth #1827
www.sifma.org/FSTE2011/

A New Silverlight Example

We have released a brand new version of the Lightstreamer Silverlight Demo, which shows some new features, like automatic reconnection, automatic resubscription, and cell highlighting.

The live demo can be seen at:
www.lightstreamer.com/demo/Silverlight_StockListDemo/

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