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We have just released new features of Diffusion Cloud, codenamed “Hawking“. This is a significant milestone for us as it represents the first iteration in our transition to a new infrastructure based on JSON and binary topics – internally known as universal topics.

So what’s all the fuss about? Users of Diffusion Cloud will know that we have extremely rich topic and subscription models and there is very little you cannot do through our APIs. However, we always want to offer our customers (that’s you I hope and if not, why not give us a try?) more! Specifically we see a number of common desires:

• JSON is becoming the lingua-franca of the internet thanks, in part, to the rise of node.js and REST-ful (micro) services. Everyone talks JSON and therefore it makes sense that we do too. This is particularly important for web developers where native support for JSON in Javascript enables them to develop applications extremely rapidly.
• We’re so much more than messaging – I say it at every presentation I give, but simple messaging is so 80’s. Yes it’s a necessary means to an end, but most customers don’t care – what they want to know about is their changing data. Diffusion Cloud has a stateful server-side model – “stateful messaging” we call it (messaging++ if you will) – that gives us tremendous power in terms of optimizations we can make. But that power also cognitively resonates with what customers want. They want to deal with data not messages, and projecting that data out to the edge – so called “live data” – brings huge benefits.
• Structured data opens up new worlds of possibility. Just as SQL in the database world spawned an entire industry, imposing schema-less formal structure on streaming data allows us – and customers – to do things that weren’t really possible before.

So JSON is where it’s at and that’s why Diffusion Cloud universal topics now support JSON natively. Watch out for future blog posts expanding on this support!

As part of this effort we’ve created new open source technology and significantly pushed the envelope with respect to data differentiating innovation.

But it doesn’t stop with JSON. We’ve also introduced support for binary topics and one cool feature of our JSON implementation is that (under the covers) everything is transmitted in binary form (so if you are thinking JSON == inefficient, think again) and we are able to natively optimize the transmission of binary differences. This opens up a new realm of possibility for the transmission of opaque data. Think of it like this – the technology underlying Diffusion Cloud is simply a delivery engine for data – it neither knows nor cares what the data is, it just optimizes its distribution and radically enhances the end-user’s experience. So as well as JSON blogs, look out for blogs demonstrating our binary topic support.

I said this was the first iteration. Expect more JSON goodness in future releases – we’ve only just started…

Want to see how easy it is to get started with Diffusion Cloud? Sign up for a free demo here.