Lightstreamer and SitePen demonstrate “Streaming AJAX” capabilities based on the Dojo Toolkit

The Dojo Toolkit, a modular open source JavaScript library designed to ease the development of AJAX-based applications, has been integrated with Lightstreamer, a high-performance Streaming-AJAX (Comet) engine. SitePen has developed a Dojo application showing real-time server-pushed data displayed through tables and charts.

Lightstreamer is a push server for live data distribution to “zero-install” clients, based on the Comet paradigm (also known as “Streaming AJAX” or “AJAX Push”). The role of Lightstreamer software is to deliver any real-time data from the server to the browser in a fast and reliable way. Once the data has reached the browser, the Dojo Toolkit is a perfect option to incorporate and use it inside a state-of-the-art AJAX application.

SitePen, a web development & consulting firm based in Silicon Valley, has developed a proof of concept that demonstrates a Dojo application that subscribes to live security prices published by Lightstreamer Server and displays them inside a Dojo table. The recent release of the Dojo Charting Tool has been leveraged to display the live prices in a graphical format as well. Streaming charts based on pure thin clients (with no applets, plug-ins or other external components) are a leading-edge application of the Comet paradigm, that will be especially appreciated by financial institutions.

“This demonstration further emphasizes the possibilities of the real-time web”, said Dylan Schiemann, CEO of SitePen, Inc. and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit. “Dojo's widget system and event model are well-suited for integrating with Lightstreamer’s Comet server. Quite frankly, we were blown away by the ease and simplicity of getting Lightstreamer up and running within just a few minutes.”

“The seamless integration between Lightstreamer and Dojo is an important achievement”, said Alessandro Alinone, CTO of Lightstreamer. “We are a very focused company and our goal is not to provide a general AJAX framework. Our mission is to deliver a high-performance and reliable push server that can work with any AJAX solution. That’s why Lightstreamer has recently entered the OpenAjax Alliance.”