Market ticks streaming to your iPhone November 14, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : finance, development , trackbackVia the Lightstreamer blog I have come across Shareprice.co.uk’s new iPhone application (AppStore) for showing live streaming LSE quote data (free for moment, but not for very long I expect). Their webpage debunks the ‘live streaming data’ claims of other similar apps which are apparently engaging in mere screen-scraping; I think far more systems still use screen-scraping these days than we’d like to acknowledge!
It looks like Shareprice.co.uk has been around since May this year and is a property of the interactive investor.
I have installed it on my iPod touch and it works well enough. I’d like to see more happening on the screen to be convinced that a connection is still active particularly if I am monitoring lightly-traded stocks. And perhaps when a tick comes down a quick green/red flash around the relevant quote might more immediately call my attention to it… or perhaps I am just going blind. News releases for any stocks in the watchlist would be great as well. The charts that appear in landscape mode take some time to appear; it feels like they are being rendered on the server and sent over the wire, surely better charts could be made by sending the historical data down to the client. That said it is very impressive for a first release and now you can watch your life savings evaporate whilst sitting on the bog 
Of course, Lightstreamer’s own streaming real-time data (not strictly financial) product is powering Shareprice thanks to the new iStreamlight API for iPhone. Unfortunately this only works with the commercial Presto and Vivace editions of Lightstreamer rather than the free developer version Moderato. I assume this means that iStreamlight uses the SDK for Generic Client Development. A shame really, all these ‘30 day trials’ for such interesting technologies (WPF/Silverlight controls from Infragistics/Telerik/DevExpress also falling into this categories) don’t really give me the time to muck around with these things at home to build something that I might be able to impress a boss with and convince them to shell out some proper moolah for on-site development/deployment!
Speaking of Silverlight neither Caplin’s Liberator nor Lightstreamer appear to have a Silverlight 2.0 SDK available just yet (sure you could use their JavaScript API’s and [ScriptableMember] but channeling ticks via this approach might not be particularly performant) and Microsoft’s own Silverlight/WCF push data solution is really just polling in push clothes.
ICE by ZeroC vaguely falls into the same category as Liberator and Lightstreamer and other ‘Comet’ solutions is open-source and has both an iPhone and Silverlight SDK.
Comments»
Hi James,
Thanks for your comments about the iPhone app.
An updated release will be uploaded to the Apple Store in the next 7 - 10 days and will include some of your enhancement suggestions. It’s also worth pointing out for your international users that it will be available in other App stores, not just the UK one where it is now.
You’re right in the assumption about the SDK for Generic Client Development. They’re quite a reasonable bunch in terms of extending a trial I found. I was in the same boat. I can only assume as other Comet servers mature then Lightstreamer will have a fight on their hands regarding pricing models.
Of relevance to some perhaps, Lightstreamer’s JAVA SE adapter seems to work nicely on the Android OS. Whatever that is?