How to test latency of Flex messages - apache-flex

I have a system where clients connect via http streaming channels and use Producer and Consumer classes to dispatch and receive messages. I need to test the latency of messages in a way that adequately simulates real-world usage when the server is under load. I have 3 ideas for how this may be accomplished. Has anyone tried and succeeded or failed with these methods?
Use an out-of-the box test system like JMeter. Haven't found any that support streaming yet.
Use Selenium and FlexMonkey on BrowserMob to simulate actual users.
Use a client api (possibly from BlazeDS) that supports streaming and Flex messaging to write a custom testing framework. Haven't found a client api that supports streaming yet, any language would be OK.

There is a tool for testing the performance of BlazeDS/LCDS, created by Adobe. Take a look here (there is a PDF file called Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 3 ES2 Performance Brief in the PDF portofolio, having a couple of attachments) .

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Is it possible to send realtime data from arduino to a server api?

I know how to build server api with java. Is it possible to send real time data from the arduino to my server api to save real time data.
Yes it's certainly possible however your server API must also be taken into consideration for best practices.
Typically you would use a protocol called MQTT to achieve this. It enables you to transmit data from resource constrained devices to a server, however HTTP has also been used. It really depends on the kinds of performance & reliability needs of your system.
If you're using a popular cloud platform they offer managed IOT services that provide well defined API's to do this.

Using RabbitMQ over HTTP

I have to connect an old but critical software to RabbitMQ. The software doesn't support AMQP, but it can do HTTP Requests.
Does RabbitMQ support plain HTTP? Or should I use a "proxy" or "app" that actively transforms the HTTP Requests to AMQP 1.0 and pushes it to the RabbitMQ server?
https://www.rabbitmq.com/management.html
The management plugin supports a simple HTTP API to send and receive messages. This is primarily intended for diagnostic purposes but can be used for low volume messaging without reliable delivery.
As mentioned, it's designed for very low loads, but it may be usable. If you need higher loads, then by all means cast around for a library that does the job and create a proxy. Most languages will have something. I've personally created a lightweight API using Lumen and https://github.com/bschmitt/laravel-amqp to tie a few disparate services together in the past, and it seems to work very well.
It is possible not but really recommended depending on load. You have three options really, two of which are web socket based and one that seems like what you're looking for. I'd suggest starting with the rabbitmq docs.

How to load test Aspnetcore.signalr application?

We need to load test aspnetcore signalR application. I saw about crank but that
seems to help only with aspnet signalR. Can someone help me with this.
Most probably you need a load testing tool which supports WebSocket protocol as this is what SignalR will be doing by default.
It could be also Server Sent Events, Forever Frame or Long Polling so you need to clarify the NFRs and identify which protocols are in scope and what are the requirements which need to be tested.
Depending on your skills you can go for:
Gatling which has support of WebSocket, but you will need to do some programming in Scala
Apache JMeter which supports WebSocket via the plugin, JMeter allows you to create tests using simple GUI. You will be able to also test Long Polling and Server Sent Events using JMeter, check out How to Load Test Async Requests with JMeter for more details.

Is it possible to push data from the server to the client (phone, computer) without OS integration

is there a way for a server to push some data to a client, wirelessly and seamlessly, which may be Windows(Phone), iPhone, Mac, or Android device, without any OS integration?
If so, what's the best design pattern to do this, and what are the best technologies to go about this?
Push technology is simply a methodology of the server initiating the transfer of data, rather than the client asking the server for it.
Apple makes push technology relatively easy to use by providing such functionality built-in on the OS. As well as Android through the Google Cloud Messaging for Android. Windows, however, does not.
Apple push notifications and Google's messaging for Android is seemingly magical and/or functionality that the OS needs to handle; however, this isn't necessarily the case. The advantage of having it "integrated" in the OS, is the same as having a framework handle the functionality for you.
Speaking in technical terms, push technology is a long-lived connection from the client to the server that accepts messages. These messages would be considered pushed messages, since the client did not make an individual request for them.
The main thing to keep in mind when implementing push technology yourself, is that the client is in charge of keeping that long-lived connection alive as much as possible. Because client IP addresses can change between disconnects, servers are not guaranteed that a client's address will be persistent across disconnects. Moreover, clients can be connected from behind a firewall, making it impossible for a server to reach the client.
For comparison, pull technology is the more traditional process of a client connecting to a server and requesting data.
Your best bet for Apple iOS will be using their push notification service.
For Android devices you should use the Google Cloud Messaging for Android. Alternatively, you can create your own background service to handle the messaging; here's a guide.
For Windows (desktop at least), you will have to create your own service to perform such duty. Here's an MSDN guide explaining how to create a Windows Service using Visual Studio (VB and C#). There might be frameworks already built that handle such messaging on Windows, however, I don't know of any.
Use WebSocket (with or without socket.io).
In the future, you could use WebRTC.
With Websockets, the setup is really simple. The client (a user agent, like a browser or a WebView) connects to the Websocket server, over http(s) (less problems with firewalls) and that's it. There's a bidirectional socket with an event-based API.
If by "OS integration" you mean "write special code for each platform" then the answer is no.
As you mentioned, you would like file system access, and background processing. That combination is not available in a cross-platform way at this moment.
If by "OS integration" you meant "without having to wait for apple/google/ms to provide the ability" then the answer is yes/maybe.
All the popular platforms have Push notifications and background processing support, as long as you code it the way each particular platform expects it.
But file system access will be limited to what restrictions the platform places on you. For instance in ios and win8(phone) there is no wy to write or read a file outside of your own apps private file structure. For security reasons, you cannot access the file system of other apps.
UPDATE:
The general pattern here is to release an app for every platform you want to support.
The app will register itself with its respective platform's push notification service.
You will write generic server side code to accept the data you want to push to all your client devices. Then you will invoke the respective push API's for each platform you support, causing the client devices to wake up and trigger the app that you provided to respond.
When the app opens, you get the app to contact your server and download the full data "the push notification being just the wakeup call for your app"
This way you can easily tell how which of your devices have received the data.
Each platform specific app must save the data to its own local storage and provide a way for the data to be shared via the methods supported by its respective platform.
On IOS it can be as simple as supporting the "Open In.." paradigm.
On W8Phone, you'll have to publish the data via one of the available "sharing contracts"
And so forth for every platform you want to support.
This is the general pattern at the moment. There are some caveats. On IOS, the app will nt automatically start when a push notification is received. This means your app will only download the whole of the data when the app is opened by the user.
A mobile app also cannot generally run indefinitely in the background. This means that once the app is started, you have a limited window for push notifications to be automatically processed by your app. After the allowed "background time". The app will close and any push notifications beep on the device, but wont open the app until the user taps on one of the notifications or opens the app directly.
Technically you could use XMPP Libraries, it is meant for implementing chat system (msn, gtalk, facebook chat, etc...) but this could work well as a push message system because it is opensource and well built to handle all the cases you never thought of. Also you could host your own server and send push message that way...
Why not use a webservice? In my previous project I used webservice to deliver data from mysql database. The webservice I used was nusoap. On the client side I used kSoap library for Android. Hope this helps.
if you want to receive and send real time communication between a server and client (irrespective of the device or OS), i would highly recommend you use XMPP technology because it is designed for the sort of things you're asking for.
The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an application profile of the Extensible Markup Language [XML] that enables the near-real-time exchange of structured yet extensible data between any two or more network entities. The core features of XMPP defined in [XMPP‑CORE] provide the building blocks for many types of near-real-time applications, which can be layered on top of the core by sending application-specific data qualified by particular XML namespaces.
http://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6121.html#intro - that is the latest RFC which will give you a good starting point.

Internet connectivity for a playn multiplayer action game

The short story: me and friend are making a multiplayer action game and we thought playn would be great for this. Android, java and HTML5 support is the most important ones but we don't want to cut out the others if not necessary.
The problem is now when we want to implement the networking part of it. We have implemented our own capable server and thought we would use long polling http requests for communication. We estimate now we need some way to have one thread running for the communication that use messages and two multithread safe queues. One queue for incoming messages that the update() part can consume from and one queue for outgoing messages to the server.
Is there any way to implement this without losing platform support? Or any other idea how we can implement this?
PlayN currently has no cross-platform support for persistent socket connections to a server. You will need to implement your own cross-platform abstraction. You can use WebSockets for the HTML5 backend, and you can look for a WebSockets library for Android and whatever other platforms you intend to support.
You can also use the Nexus library, which is designed to work with PlayN and provide client/server communication. However, it raises the level of abstraction substantially beyond passing simple messages between the client and server, so it might be easier to just implement your own simple WebSockets based communication than to learn how Nexus works.

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