Real-Time with FME Server

Real-time systems are those that act on events as they happen, and send information as it becomes available.

Real-time is often implemented to monitor sensor networks, run event-driven processing, and/or to send alerts to external clients such as a mobile device or email. Therefore real-time data processing is commonly used to handle small amounts of information (rather than large datasets) that arrive either as individual events or as a continuous communication stream.

Real-world examples of data that would arrive as individual events include processing simple location data from a vehicle tracking system or sending an email to a system administrator in response to database table updates. An example of continuous data would be handling a stream of data being sent from a temperature sensor or lightning detector.

Real-time data in FME Server is handled in two ways: Automations and Message Streams.

Automations

Automations are how FME Server handles individual message streaming and alerts.

FME Server allows you to build Automation workflows that can be set up to listen for an incoming message from outside of FME, and trigger a certain action in response, or that can be set up to send a single alert in response to an event that takes place on FME Server.

Triggers and actions include email, FME Server system events, directory watchers, WebSockets and notifications to Apple or Android devices.

Message Streaming

Message Streaming is a real-time technique like Automations. However, where automations receive/send one-off messages, Message Streaming involves a continuous flow of information.

Instead of a workflow being run once for each message, handling a message stream involves creating a workspace that will connect to the stream and run continuously receiving messages as soon as they are sent. Because of this reduced overhead, this technique can process data at a much faster rate than Automations. For our purposes, “continuous” means that messages arrive at the FME Server at a faster rate than Automations could handle; say more than one message per second.

Message Streaming will be explained in more depth in Chapter 5.