Proteus 2.0

Java without the Palaver

The Humraz web site was developed using the Proteus2 framework. This is a complex auction site whereby the winner of the auction is determined by the lowest unique bid, not the highest bid. The potential is that you can buy a very valuable item, like a house or a bar of gold for the price of a box of choclates. For details of the auction model see the Humraz website.

Greenwich Real Time was asked to build both their new site and a Lowest Unique Bidding Engine (LUBE) which would allow bidders to participate in an auction in real-time and which would ensure that every participant in the auction was able to see the status of their bids change as a result of the potentially thousands of other participants.

The design and implementation of the LUBE was a challenge. How to maintain so many simultaneous connections efficiently and to provide a mechanism whereby we could update their bidding consoles in real-time? The answer was to use some of the ideas and technology we had developed for SiteDancer, a browser controller. At the heart of SiteDancer is a reliable mechanism for being able to send instructions to a browser, without it having to poll the server, so that the browsers are updated immediately.

LUBE demonstrates that it is possible to use a so called 'push' approach with just javascript. Participants in the auctions do not have to have Flash installed or accept an Applet.

Below is a schematic of how it all works within the context of the Proteus2 framework.