Panopticon Enterprise is our server product that enables web deployment of Panopticon’s visual business intelligence technology. Our latest release uses “Streaming AJAX” technology to push data in real-time from the server to its web front-ends. This allows us to deliver live data with real-time updates over the Internet to web clients using standard HTTP connections. This is a great feature that enables companies to easily expose real-time data streams to their employees and/or customers. The system works equally well on a company Intranet or on the public Internet.

This new real-time functionality is available in both editions of Panopticon Enterprise — Java and .NET.

Previous versions of the server product used a more traditional stateless delivery model; clients polled the server to receive updates. The new Streaming AJAX solution is quite different. We’re no longer polling the server for updates — the server is delivering real-time updates to the clients as they happen, when they happen.

You can still configure Panopticon Enterprise in the traditional stateless “polling” mode if you like. In this case, the refresh rate is set for the client applications. The clients make a background request for updates at defined time intervals and new data that has accumulated since the last request is delivered to the client in a batch. Polling mode may the best way to use the system in some application scenarios. It offers great scalability; a single server can handle huge number of users without requiring a lot of hardware. However, it is better suited for static data than for highly dynamic real-time feeds since the network bandwidth consumed using polling mode can become large in deployments with large numbers of clients and frequent data updates. For example, you might see problems if you had tens of thousands of clients requesting updates every few seconds.

The new Streaming AJAX technology in the current version of Enterprise provides an excellent alternative to polling mode and also provides users with a greatly enhanced experience. Real-time streams of data are delivered to the clients with very low latency and with minimal bandwidth consumption. The Streaming AJAX engine we use from Lightstreamer has been optimized for real-time distribution of data through HTTP connections based on a publish/subscribe paradigm.

The Streaming AJAX mode is highly scalable. It can support thousands of connections per CPU. The system also allows you to add additional servers and use load balancing tools. The Lightstreamer Streaming AJAX engine includes some really handy features that are particularly useful to Panopticon users:

• Bandwidth and frequency control function designed to avoid problems with unpredictable network traffic
• Adaptive streaming function designed to avoid data bursts and data aging; the system adapts in order to not send more data than the network can handle

This technology allows our web client applications with web-based visualizations to provide a richer and more responsive user experience, one closer to what is possible in richly interactive desktop applications for streaming data.

Displaying real-time streaming data in a web client presents some interesting design issues. The screen can get very busy unless you carefully design the software to make it easy for people to interpret the real-time updates. The designer has to take high update frequencies into account and present changes in an understandable way. We have developed and evaluated a range of alternative solutions to address these challenges, in order to come up with a design solution that allowed users to take effective advantage of this great new real-time streaming technology. We developed a new set of “visual change effects” that helps users to perceive frequent changes. These graphical effects are unique to Panopticon. They animate changes to the data by calling attention to the changing value and the event type. We’ve had very promising user acceptance of this approach. With this technique, it’s quite easy to see the real-time updates, but you can still make sense of what’s happening to the big picture as well. Give us a call and we can show you how it works!

Markus Skyttner
CTO
Panopticon Software

posted by Hugh R Heinsohn  # 1:12 AM