We recently had a conversation with Wolfram Hempel, CEO and Co-founder of deepstream.io to chat about realtime services and how it's changing the face of the web and apps.
Editors note: A relic from the dark ages of webdesign, Wolfram clawed his way to the light of superfast servers & realtime systems. He dabbled with technologies behind financial trading, investment banking, AAA gaming, travel booking & the strange world where fridges talk to the internet.
ADM: What is deepstream and what does it do?
Hempel: deepstream is a new type of server for realtime applications. It handles data synchronization, publish-subscribe messaging and request-response workflows and can scale to millions of simultaneous clients.
ADM: What are the benefits for developers to use deepstream?
Hempel: deepstream is easy to use and can replace the traditional backends for any kind of app. Its speed makes it a good choice for low latency use cases such as multiplayer gaming or financial trading whereas its distributed data-sync and persistence capabilities make it useful for collaborative SaaS, Browser & Mobile Apps, Geotracking, IoT or event streaming.
ADM: What’s the biggest complaint developers have about deepstream?
Hempel: Permissioning used to be really hard to use - we’ve fixed that lately by introducing Valve - an expressive permission language especially for realtime apps. That leaves us with the second biggest complaint - lifecycle management (creating / updating /discarding) records can be hard to stay on top of.
ADM: What is deepstream’s mission?
Hempel: We believe that the web goes through major technological iterations. It started of as a static content archive, added server-side functionality, richer interactions with javascript and eventually fully fetched webapps using Ajax.
We believe that realtime is the next step in this evolution and we want to create the infrastructure to make this possible
ADM: Why do you think you can build this infrastructure?
Hempel: We come from an investment banking and realtime trading technology background. These industries have received a lot of criticism over the last years and in many cases rightfully so. But they do have some of the most demanding technology requirements when it comes to speed, resilience and security - and they have the money to build the solutions that match.
ADM: Why did you make deepstream open source?
Hempel: We’ve worked on a lot of secretive and proprietary technologies in the past, yet benefited heavily from open source. So it was time for us to give back. Realtime is a strong trend in the web technology landscape we believe that the only chance for our server to succeed is for it to be completely open and accessible.
ADM: What have you built using deepstream?
Hempel: We’ve used it ourselves to build a large scale, browser based stock trading app [
https://vimeo.com/143728632]. Other developers have build usecases as diverse as integrated messaging [
https://briteback.com/], multiplayer gaming and even curing Alzheimer’s.
ADM: How does deepstream compare to existing solutions?
Hempel: There isn’t much out there in terms of fast open source data-sync at the moment - so we’re in many ways pioneers in this field. Most existing solutions are self-build using lower level connectivity libraries like Socket.io or SignalR or pub/sub services like Pusher or PubNub.
ADM: What does the future of realtime look like to you?
Hempel: The world happens in realtime, yet a lot of platforms and services are struggling with the infrastructure to accommodate that fact. We are working on deepstreamHub, a platform that provides this infrastructure and makes developer and end-user services accessible in realtime for everyone.
ADM: Can you tell us more about deepstreamHub?
Hempel: deepstreamHub will be a cloud service, based on deepstream’s core concepts of data-sync, pub-sub and request-response to make it easy for any developer to build their own realtime apps.
It will offer access a wealth of developer functionality such as realtime search, messaging, job scheduling, email and push-notifications as well as third party integrations.
deepstreamHub will go into beta in late Autumn this year, if you wan’t to be amongst the first to testdrive it, sign up here [
https://deepstreamhub.com/]