Introduction

Philosophy

The main driving force behind the development of the Smarkets streaming API is efficiency. Many other applications in our industry rely on “polling” a service in order to provide a real-time view of changing data. While the streaming API can be used in a “synchronous” manner by making a request and waiting for a response, it is often far more efficient to design an application asynchronously. Asynchronous messaging allows for more flexible patterns and techniques like pipelining.

The streaming API also uses framed protocol buffers to define the wire format, so parsing messages is relatively fast and simple. We will endeavour to maintain backwards compatibility as we release newer revisions of the API. Protocol buffers definitions provide a decent facility for doing so.

MIT License

In selecting a software license, we aimed to choose one which allows third-party application developers flexibility in using the code we provide.

The Smarkets Python API Client is released under the MIT License.

Smarkets Python API Client License

Copyright (c) 2011 Smarkets Limited

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.