nats

I added new end-to-end example in the monoblok repo: examples/json-massive. If you’re new to monoblok, you may want to check out the introductory post. Tick data moves fast, the JSON frames carry several fields per message, and every downstream consumer otherwise re-implements the same demux, round, dedupe, alert plumbing. Doing it once at the broker means subscribers can use subject filtering to pick the slice they actually need and ignore the rest....

There’s now a public monoblok demo server you can use with any NATS client to try it out. It is at nats://monoblok.rtd.pub:4222, docs at demo.md. Grab the nats CLI, save the demo server as a context once, and select it so you don’t have to type the URL every time: nats context save monoblok-demo --server nats://monoblok.rtd.pub:4222 nats context select monoblok-demo Now nats pub and nats sub go straight to the public demo server....

Want to jump straight to the code? A car publishes its engine RPM ten times a second. A market data feed ticks on every quote. A cheap temperature sensor posts a fresh reading every two seconds, mostly identical to the last one. Data moves quickly, but most of it is noise: a publisher that doesn’t know what its subscribers care about, and a fleet of subscribers each writing the same defensive code to round, debounce, and ignore the boring readings....

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?...