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Today’s savvy consumer wants the best price, the best possible service and increasingly wants to save time in the process. Despite the excesses of the Dot Com (and subsequently Dot Bomb) period, the Internet remains an important medium for reaching customers and providing innovative services. Consumers are becoming increasingly dependent on the Web as a tool to manage their lives, be that as a source of information, for on-line banking, purchasing, entertainment and communication. Whatever the application, one common factor to all areas of use is that consumers require up-to-date information “On-time, all the time”. So in order to be successful, suppliers must continue to adapt the way they provide customers with information.
Because static web pages require a manual reload to request any updated data,
live information is often distributed via email or SMS, with the result that sometimes overwhelming amounts of messages are circulated in an inefficient way and get ignored. A better way of sharing time-critical and dynamic information to many users is via real-time web pages. With flexible portals and pages configured like dynamic dashboards to provide an immediate real-time snapshot to each individual user, who subscribes to receive only the information required.
But delivering dynamic web content via the Internet conflicts with the original web paradigm, which is due to the fact that HTML navigation is intrinsically
pull or 'upon request' (as opposed to email which is push).
Polling (the automatic page reloading at predetermined intervals) is a poor attempt at resolving this conflict. In many cases, it fails because it’s not scalable, and places a high demand on the infrastructure by continually reloading entire pages, when only a few fields within it may actually have changed.
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Solving the paradigm conflict |
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The solution to this problem is Lightstreamer, the latest generation of
true push technology. It streams real-time data with HTML and JavaScript, without the need to download or install anything on the client. Since earlier unsuccessful implementations of push technology did not deliver on expectations following it's inception in 1996, it has now finally matured as a viable solution with Lightstreamer. The adopted strategy has been one of simplicity, by using standards (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript), rather than proprietary protocols, yet it is sophisticated in its implementation.
With ubiquity and integration in mind, the Lightstreamer architecture is based on standards. Designed from the beginning for ease of integration with any existing platform, in order to simplify the addition of a real-time push functionality. |
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Lightstreamer Bandwidth Allocation & Management |
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The automatic adaptive control of the TCP network makes Lightstreamer indispensable for pushing live data via the Internet. It can in fact modulate the bandwidth required to push data as a function of the available bandwidth at any instant. This means that whenever the network quality decreases (e.g. congestion), Lightstreamer reduces the update frequency through heuristic filters. In this way, the user always receives new data, independent from the connection speed available at any instant in time.
In addition, there is the facility to define the bandwidth control for each individual user: whereby different service levels (e.g. standard, premium, gold) corresponding to utilized bandwidth (and consequently price) are controlled. Depending on the type of chosen service level, individually assigned
maximum bandwidth, data update frequency and message filtering, are set-up for each user access.
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Types of Live Pushed Services |
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The diversity and scope for the potential application of Lightstreamer technology is endless. It relates to any application area where it is necessary to update users with real-time information.
Some example applications are:
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Webmail clients |
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News distribution (RSS, other feeds) |
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Online Communities and Social Networks |
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Chats & Instant Messaging |
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Sports results |
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Transportation: arrivals,
departures, delays etc. |
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Public utility services |
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Online auctions |
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Online games, gambling |
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Tourism, ticket offices |
To have a deeper insight please download our White Paper. |
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