Lightstreamer: A Quick Overview

Transcription

1 Lightstreamer: A Quick Overview Oct 2012

2 With twelve years experience in real-time Web technology, Weswit has provided Lightstreamer to a growing number of companies ranging from small size startups to Fortune 500 corporations, including top-tier financial institutions, as well as aerospace, military, energy, gaming, sporting, and entertainment companies. In 2012, Weswit has been recognized as a Cool Vendor in Application and Integration Platforms by the the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Weswit has thousands of free users and hundreds of customers worldwide, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, NASA, Sony Music, Bwin.party, Honeywell, SocGen, UBS, IG Group, City Index, ICAP, and Fixnetix. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

3 Lightstreamer: an Overview Lightstreamer is a world-class solution for pushing real-time data over the Web to and from any desktop/mobile browsers and apps. All desktop and mobile technologies are fully supported, including HTML, JavaScript, ios, Android, Windows Phone, Java,.NET, and many others. High scalability, low bandwidth usage, smart firewall traversal, adaptive throttling, and total reliability are some Lightstreamer's key features.

4 The Market Niche of Lightstreamer Lightstreamer created a new market niche in 2000, which is now known by several different terms (even if with no perfect overlapping of meanings and with changing hype based on the historical period). Push Technology Real-Time Web Comet WebSockets Reverse AJAX Streaming AJAX Web Streaming Data Push Data Streaming Last Mile Messaging Lightstreamer is currently the leader in this market niche, in terms of installations and longevity.

5 Some History: Pull The traditional paradigm of the Web is synchronous (request/response) ==> Pull Typical issues: Low update frequency; no real time High bandwidth usage High load on server and network infrastructure

6 Pull and HTTP HTTP 1.1, with all its pros and cons, has become the standard way for Client/Server interaction over the Internet, even for nonbrowser Clients. The standard network infrastructure has evolved to completely and transparently support only HTTP (proxy servers, firewall port restrictions, etc.). Even non-html Clients (Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Java,.NET, Android, ios, etc.) have to use HTTP to work on the wild Internet. But... HTTP originated and evolved as a synchronous/pull paradigm.

7 Some History: Push Modern Push Technology market niche originated in 2000 with the goal of providing an asynchronous, streaming-based paradigm on the top of HTTP ==> Push Streaming audio or video is very different from streaming data and requires alternative technologies. After initial request from the Client, the Server keeps pushing new data (Comet streaming and long polling). Advantages: High update frequency; true real time Low bandwidth usage (very little overhead) Low load on the network infrastructure

8 The Real-Time Web Bidirectional Data Push: pushing data both from the server to the client and from the client to the server. Lightstreamer introduced bidirectional push with guranteed delivery many years ago over HTTP. WebSockets: a recent protocol for bidirectional data streaming alternative to HTTP. A WebSockets Server does not become automatically a full-fledged Push Server, because the messaging protocol, as well as data semantics management and network optimization features need to be implemented from scratch (i.e. are not standardized). Lightstreamer includes a rock-solid implementation of WebSockets.

9 Lightstreamer s Architecture Lightstreamer Server: a stand-alone server that sits along any existing Web server Lightstreamer Data Adapter: a custom component based on the provided API (Java,.NET, and TCP sockets) to attach the data feed a to the Server and inject the real-time data flow. Lightstreamer Metadata Adapter: a custom component based on the provided API (Java,.NET, and TCP sockets) to implement authentication, authorization, and entitlement logic.

10 Client APIs A specific API is provided for each supported client technology: HTML, HTML5, JavaScript Android Apple ios (iphone, ipad, ipod) Adobe Flash, Flex, AIR Java Microsoft Silverlight Microsoft.NET Microsoft WinRT Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and 8 RIM BlackBerry Implement the Adapters once on the server side and push the data to any possible client-side technology with no additional effort.

11 Lightstreamer's Scalability Highly concurrent staged event-driven architecture Twelve years of optimization iterations. Non-blocking I/O used for all types of connections. Graceful degradation of the quality of service in the case that the server CPU is saturated. Tested on a single box with: one million connections with low frequency traffic; or tens of thousands connections with very high frequency traffic. Horizontal scalability: A cluster of Lightstreamer Servers can be easily implemented through a standard Web Load Balancer Vertical scalability: an instance of Lightstreamer Server can fully leverage multiple CPUs and cores available in a box.

12 Lightstreamer's Network Management Adaptive Streaming Lightstreamer automatically detects Internet congestions and heuristically throttles the data flow based on the available bandwidth, avoiding data ageing. Data is aggregated efficiently within TCP packets, with a direct control over the number of sent packets (configurable trade-off between latency and overhead reduction, overriding the Nagle algorithm). Delta delivery, pure-payload protocol, data conflation, data filtering. Bandwidth and Frequency Control Maximum bandwidth can be allocated for each user. Maximum update frequency can be allocated for each subscription. Stream-Sense Automatically find the best transport based on the available infrastructure: WebSockets, HTTP Streaming, HTTP Smart Polling. Totally transparent to the final users.

13 Downalod Lightstreamer and Give it a Try!