Web Messaging for Internet Data Streaming

7/28/2019 Web Messaging for Internet Data Streaming

1/5

Copyright 2011

Solace Systems, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.

Integrating Internet Data Streaminginto the Enterprise Middleware LayerThe increasing demand for real-time data has companies of all kinds seeking ways to stream

information to users over the internet, both at their desks and on the go. Two key technological

developments are paving the way for this trend:

o Internet push/streaming technologies: The web communications approaches known as

Comet and HTTP Streaming enable the bi-directional, asynchronous delivery of data to

HTTP-connected clients, and the emergent WebSocket API and protocol enable full-duplex bi-

directional communications over a TCP connection.

oApplication frameworks: HTML5/JavaScript, Silverlight, and Flash let developers give users

a rich user experience including dynamically updated content through Rich Internet

Applications that run in web browsers without requiring software installation on desktops. In

addition, platforms like Apples iOS and Googles Android have caused an explosion in the

number of lightweight apps capable of real-time internet-based communication.

To date, even with these technologies in play, companies that want to push real-time data to their

users have to deploy web streaming servers to do so, and integrate them with the middleware

platforms they use to connect applications and distribute information within their organization.

New Integrated ApproachSolace is the leading provider of messaging middleware

appliances. Solace has extended its Unified MessagingPlatformwhich provides reliable, guaranteed, JMS, low

latency, IPC and WAN distributionto seamlessly support

the streaming of real-time data over the internet.

This lets companies quickly and cost-effectively add

internet streaming capabilities to their IT infrastructure so

they can give people inside and outside of their

organization rich, dynamically-updated and interactive

views of information. Examples include:

oEnterprise: retail brokerages, FX trading, mobile

workforce, logistics, and emergency response.

oConsumer: web properties, sports, news, gambling,

online gaming, auctions, and social media.

This paper describes the architecture and advantages of Solaces Web Messaging solution, as

well as its unprecedented performance. Solaces solution is 50-200 times faster than competitive

solutions with latency under 100 microseconds, (not milliseconds like competitors) and throughput

of 4 million messages and 10 Gbps per second.


2/5

Integrating Web Messaging into Enterprise Middleware La

2Proprietary and Confidential

Solaces Appliance AdvantageSolaces Unified Messaging Platform is based on a purpose-

built appliance that handles all of the requirements for

messaging across the enterprise between server applications

and distribution to internal desktops, including reliable,

guaranteed, JMS and WAN messaging.

Solaces appliance is ideally suited for web messaging

because it provides exactly what application developers need:

a full-featured, bidirectional, real-time messagingsystem that

works seamlessly over the internet to RIAs, as opposed to

streaming solutions that need to be integrated with existing

messaging systems.

Solaces Web Messaging solution provides real-time connectivity through internet intermediaries such as proxies, firewalls,

network address translators, and provides lightweight, efficient, feature rich and easy to use messaging APIs. Solace

messaging appliances provide scale, capacity, high rate, low consistent latency and robustness unmatched by any

software messaging system or streaming server, which is why they have been adopted by many of the worlds largest

companies, including tier 1 investment banks and mobile data carriers.

So by simply adding support for the latest application frameworks and presentation technologies used in internet data

streaming to its APIs and providing a web/HTTP transport, Solace has developed the only messaging platform that offers a

unified solution for real-time communications across intranet/LAN and internet/web environments, supporting the features

and message exchange patterns needed to satisfy all applications.

Advantages and Benefits of Solaces Web Messaging SolutionoScalability: Solaces solution provides external connection fanout scalability without placing large scalability demands

on the internal messaging system.

oPerformance: Solaces all-hardware datapath ensures the ability to process an input message rate of millions of

messages per second, millions of topics and subscriptions and provide higher fanout rates with much lower, morepredictable latency than software solutions. A single appliance supports fanout message rates of 4 Million msgs/sec

and 10Gbps of bandwidth.

oMessaging functionality: Solaces full-featured messaging system offers much more than a raw internet byte pipe, it

gives developers access to all of the messaging features and qualities of services used by server applications, such as

topic-based publish/subscribe with wildcard subscriptions, request/reply, per-client message rate limiting, structured

messages, authentication, per-user & per topic access controls.

oLightweight, simple RIA APIs: Solaces RIA APIs have a low code and memory footprint, are very simple and

intuitive to use and feature very efficient runtime, which leaves more CPU for the RIAs while still providing rich

messaging functionality to application designers.

oManageability: Detailed management of TCP connections, queue thresholds,events, user capabilities, data

backup/restore and more.

oReliability: A datapath implemented in hardware means increased robustness because it is not susceptible to

standard internet attacks and software incompatibilities with other server software.

oPeer-to-Peer: Solace supports client-to-client communication within the Solace appliance so clients can have chat

sessions with one-on-one or in a group with all messaging contained to the Solace appliances in the DMZ.


3/5



Conventional Web Streaming Solutions

Most internet distribution solutions include the following components, architected something like the diagram below.

oClient APIs: APIs that run in RIAs in containers such as Microsoft

Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) or browsersusing JavaScript, or running on smartphones and mobile devices.

Some provide only a raw packet pipe without much messaging

functionality, a few others provide more messaging functionality to

the application, but all provide the ability to dynamically establish a

connection between the client application and the datacenter

through whatever internet intermediaries (proxies, firewalls, NATs,

load balancers) that may exist along the way, so they hide this

complexity from the application and this is an important part of the

value they provide.

oWeb Streaming Servers: Streaming servers that sit in the

demilitarized zone (DMZ) and translate between internet streaming

and transport protocols used by the internal messaging system.

They are often implemented in Java and thus have the scalability

and performance of Java applications, and dont offer generic

messaging capabilities.

oStreaming Server-to-Messaging Integration: Typically,

companies need to integrate the streaming server to the back-end

messaging system to perform transport and payload conversion,

and helper functions may also be required in the GUI runtime.

o Internal Message Bus(es): No software message bus products used for internal messaging support Internet

streaming and Internet streaming products typically dont support the functionality and performance required of internal

messaging systems, so deployments today tend to have different messaging products for internal application use vs

Internet streaming Often times, multiple internal messaging systems might be used: one for streaming information,

another for transactional system interactions.oManagement: The management tools provided to monitor streaming servers varies greatly, but typically little external

management is available and integration with 3rd

party umbrella management, authentication and other systems is left

to the user. In any event, certainly the management, security, monitoring mechanisms in the web streaming tier are

different from those used by the internal enterprise messaging system.

Disadvantages of Standalone Streaming Servers

oPerformance and scalability: Web streaming servers implemented in software struggle with output rate and

consistent latency in usecases where the input message rate is high and the fanout requirements and subscription

count are large. Functions like payload transformation,per-connection bandwidth management and realtime monitoring

degrade performance even further. To perform publish/subscribe fanout in the streaming server, you either need to

map external connections 1:1 back to the internal messaging system (as with JMS), or perform per-client fanout in the

streaming server, which means you need to track subscriptions, route messages, etc.again, requiring developers tobuild messaging functionality.

oMessaging Functionality: Web streaming servers act as gateways, and dont offer messaging capabilities such as

publish/subscribe, request/reply, user authentication/authorization, and machine independent data types. This means

developers must spend their time building messaging functionality into this web streaming layer.

oAnother integration and distribution tier:A separate web streaming solution must be deployed, integrated with the

existing middleware, and folded in to functions such as administration, security, and capacity planning.

oDifferences in internal and external applications: Internal installed applications will need to use different APIs,

semantics and data formats than applications and RIAs connecting over the Internet, or at least require additional

bindings to the new gateway, including data and semantic translations.


4/5


5/5



Solace Web Messaging in Context of a Third-Party Messaging Infrastructure

Some companies want to add internet distribution capabilities as an

extension of their existing internal messaging platform. By handling

everything related to internet fanout in a single appliance that can be

quickly and easily dropped in to a datacenter and linked with existing

messaging systems, Solace makes it easy and cost-effective to extendexisting systems with real-time web messaging.

In such a deployment, Solaces solution offers high-performance bi-

directional web messaging without placing heavy load on the existing

message bus because Solaces appliance automatically distributes each

message to many appropriate clients based on subscription so theres no

need for 1:1 mapping of client connections to the message bus, or for

complex mappings to fan one message out via many external connections.

This reduces the layers of infrastructure for easier management and

superior performance and thus also supports direct peer-to-peer

communication.

Solace Web Messaging in Context of a Solace Messaging Infrastructure

The Solace Web Messaging solution is even more powerful for companies who also use Solace for messaging from their

internal data sources as it provides a strategic, ubiquitous solution. By extending intranet messaging to include web

messaging, companies can have one truly unified messaging platform for all of their internal and external messaging,

including:

oWhen Solace is used as the internal message bus and for internetconnectivity, applications connect using the same API whether theyre

deployed within the intranet or over the internet since theyre

connecting to the same platform. The Solace API determines the most

efficient transport based on the capabilities of the application and

presence of intermediaries such as HTTP proxies.

oA common framework for provisioning, managing, monitoring and

securing all messaging components regardless of whether they are

used for internal or external message distribution, all without gateways

and tiers of infrastructure.

oSimpler and more efficient data distribution since there is no

integration between different messaging systems.

oNo integration effort, costs or components are required (API

integration, data transformation, messaging semantics integration)

between the internet gateway of Vendor A and the messaging system

of Vendor B with an all-Solace solution, internet fanout is simply an

extension of the existing internal messaging network.

Documents

Web Messaging for Internet Data Streaming