Lightstreamer is a software product for delivering real-time textual data to any kind of application through the Internet. Banks and online-gaming companies typically use it to dispatch live updates to their Web pages or Flex applications, supporting high numbers of parallel connections. Recently, solutions have been released that use Lightstreamer to push live data to the iPhone. There are two active fronts: solutions that push the data to the iPhone browser and solutions that push the data to iPhone native applications.

In the first category, a pioneer is IG Group. In March 2008 they launched the innovative iPhone dealing service, a pure web application that enables traders to deal as easily on their iPhone or iPod Touch as they can on their desktops, with no downloads necessary. Lightstreamer takes care of updating the widgets running inside the iPhone browser in streaming mode.

In the second category, Shareprice, a project by Interactive Investor, released the first approved native iPhone application to integrate with Lightstreamer. "Following the market in real-time is increasingly important during such turbulent economic conditions", says Tim Huckle, CTO at Interactive Investor, "And extending real-time streaming data to mobile devices including the iPhone was made possible for relatively little effort via our use of Lightstreamer technology".

The Shareprice application for the iPhone embeds an open-source library that implements the Lightstreamer network protocol. This library, named iStreamLight and hosted on Google Code, was developed by Gianluca Bertani, a software architect who is very active in the finance domain. "I had the opportunity to work with the Lightstreamer protocol in previous experiences, and I thought it would have been quite easy to develop a native iPhone library for it, as my first experiment", says Gianluca, "And now I'm pleased to know it has been useful for the Shareprice application".

Alessandro Alinone, CTO of Lightstreamer, comments: "It is very interesting to see how Lightstreamer is leveraged by third parties to deliver real-time data updates to the iPhone. We have always been committed to supporting any type of client technologies and the iPhone is a brilliant example of this trend".