Motivating use cases

When might you want to have a consistent interface to interact with streaming data?

• acquiring sensor data
  • audio
  • can data
  • video
  • plc data
  • all kinds of IoT sensors
• acquiring live streams
  • wifi
  • bluetooth
  • http streams
  • mqtt
• reading a DB cursor
• reading a very large file, or several contiguous files
• network data not meant to be read as binary (i.e. live-parsing a list in JSON format without needing the whole list to be received before parsing starts)

What might you want to do with the stream

• Iterate over its contents
• Iterate over chunks of its contents
• Slice (retrieve based on interval query of "recent past")