nats

Watching a feed, deriving a few values, and firing an alert when something looks off shouldn’t require a Kafka cluster, a JVM, and three days of ceremony. For a lot of problems, it doesn’t. NATS is a natural hub for streaming values: lightweight, subject-routed, no schema enforcement. The missing piece is somewhere to do the computation. It turns out Excel is a left-field but fairly compelling answer. It puts stream processing in the hands of analysts who already know how to use it, without asking them to learn a new framework or become developers overnight....

The Excel C SDK dates from the early 1990s. Memory management is manual, the type system is painful, and there’s almost no tooling. Despite all of this, it remains the only way to build add-ins that run truly in-process with Excel, supporting multi-threaded recalculation and the full breadth of what the host application can do. If you want the best possible performance, you need an XLL. But it’s a foot gun....

I have used NATS on various projects over the years. It provides a high performance transport layer than can be used to connect applications and services. If you haven’t already heard of it, this video is a fantastic primer. NATS supports websocket connections. nats.ws runs in browsers. This means we can directly use NATS as the backend for browser-based applications that need to display realtime streams of data. Why is this interesting?...