June 2019 Summaries

Realtime Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are crucial for enhancing mobility and efficiency in the transport industry. They enable effective sharing of data between people, transport modes, and systems, often in real-time. The article outlines five strategies to deploy realtime APIs for better overall mobility: being IoT-ready, upgrading REST-APIs, embracing the real 'sharing economy', engineering your way into the Realtime Economy, and joining the movement. These strategies aim to improve data transfer infrastructure, support holistic transport systems, and create a more efficient and connected urban environment.

Ably, a realtime platform for developers, has added support for Server-Sent Events (SSE) protocol through its Adapter. This makes it the fifth supported protocol on the platform, with existing support for MQTT, STOMP, AMQP, and other proprietary realtime protocols. The beta release is fully operational and production-ready. SSE is a server push technology that enables automatic updates from a server to a browser or device via HTTP connection. It's commonly used for sending message updates, new events, or continuous data streams to a browser client. Ably recommends its realtime client library SDKs for most realtime use cases as they provide a richer set of features and reliability.

Innovate UK has granted £370k to London startup Ably Realtime for the development of additional features on its global network. The funding supplements initial investments from the London Co-investment Fund and Forward Partners, and will be used to improve scalability and elasticity in realtime data exchange globally. Founded in 2013, Ably has developed a cloud-based, protocol-agnostic realtime data delivery platform that is distributed globally with native protocol interoperability and countless third-party integrations. The company's API Streamer significantly expands its infrastructure offering for businesses needing to share data in real time and developers building realtime services.

The article discusses the evolution of data sharing networks and their implications for future data consumption. It begins with HTTP, a protocol that enables nodes to transfer information between computers using standardized protocols following common rule sets. The request-response model of HTTP is highlighted as crucial to data sharing. As websites started selling goods and services, this led to unprecedented traffic and the need for caching resources. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were introduced to streamline the process by serving users through a new service provider while allowing website engineering teams to focus elsewhere. The article then moves on to the API era, where companies and organizations opened new revenue streams by making their data available as APIs. This required maintenance and additional features like analytics, rate-limiting, and access management. API management tools emerged to address these issues. The need for REST API management tools is exemplified by large-scale acquisitions such as Salesforce's acquisition of Mulesoft. The article concludes with the advent of event-driven data sharing, which necessitated new data transfer mechanisms like HTTP-Polling, HTTP Long Polling, and WebSockets. Realtime data transfer required bi-directional, persistent connections, leading to the development of Data Stream Networks (DSNs) such as PubNub, Pusher, and Ably. These networks enable realtime messaging infrastructure at scale, allowing developers to focus on building next-generation applications and services. The future of data exchange is expected to be heavily influenced by realtime API Management tools, which will enable a culture of Big Data not as an "island in the cloud" but as an online/offline universe based on event-driven communications.

This article compares WebSockets and long polling as methods for building live experiences online. Long polling is a more efficient form of HTTP request/response polling, where the server holds a client connection open until new data becomes available or a timeout threshold is reached. WebSockets are built on top of TCP/IP stack and provide an as-close-to-raw-as-possible TCP communication layer with added abstractions for security considerations. Long polling has advantages such as universal support through XMLHttpRequest, but disadvantages include resource intensity and latency issues. WebSockets offer benefits like reduced latency and full-duplex messaging, but lack automatic recovery when connections are terminated. The article also discusses Ably's serverless WebSocket solution for building live experiences and its support for various transports including WebSockets, XHR streaming, XHR polling, and JSONP polling.