# Everything live

"In my teenage years, I was into photography. Standing at the summit, you have an immeasurable amount of detail and movement before you — yet your camera can capture only a small portion of it. How do you convey the completeness of that view, with precision and without distortion?

I pursue the same goal with the Vantage framework and Vantage UI. The amount of data your organisation operates on is massive. A Vantage app is a window into that data — it has to respect the ecosystem while becoming part of it.

It took me two years to build Vantage — the culmination of 35 years as a software engineer and framework architect. This page is dedicated to the technical excellence at its foundation."

— Romans, author of Vantage

## The moment something changes..

Are you a fan of the "refresh" button, or Ctrl+R? If you find them annoying — why is this a feature all apps have?

Go ahead — click the refresh one last time:

Refresh-based

Let's never have refresh buttons again. Vantage offers a solution to live data — and not just for the UI app you're building, but for your entire organisation. I won't lie — it's a hard, comprehensive challenge, but I've done most of the work for you.

Any application you build with Vantage has an inherent ability to be real-time. Dashboards, forms, drop-downs and search fields in your Vantage app will update in real-time without data loss or visible flicker.

## The art of making a change

Observing changes in real-time is only half the solution. Making a change is an entirely different problem. Once again, Vantage has a perfect solution — built in, no extra cost:

Vantage has configurable mechanisms for change resolution during data entry or during a save event — such as change patching and change routing for event-driven system designs. Vantage's architecture is fully idempotent.

## Change event support by backends

Vantage will take advantage of databases or APIs that support "push updates" without additional configuration. For unsupported databases, however, there are still ways around it — either low-level cache polling/invalidation checks, or CDC streams:

SurrealDB live queries push no setup

SpacetimeDB subscriptions push no setup

PostgreSQL notify channels push one trigger · explicit opt-in

SQLite · MySQL · MongoDB · REST · GraphQL · AWS · Kubernetes · CLI background refresh poll at an interval you choose

Debezium + Kafka change-data-capture stream push brings push to any backend

**CDC — change-data-capture** — turns your database's own change log into a stream of events. Debezium reads it from Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and most databases you already run, and publishes every change to Kafka; Vantage subscribes and delivers it as push to every open screen. And it isn't limited to Debezium — Vantage wires into any CDC mechanism through a custom cache strategy built on the open framework.

## Vantage live API export

Vantage can export APIs that support live protocols — WebSocket, or a [Kubernetes-style](https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/api-concepts/#efficient-detection-of-changes) `?watch=true` stream delivered as [NDJSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_streaming). Read more about how to make one in [The Vantage Book](https://vantage-ui.com/book/intro/step5-sql-dio.html).

## Built for a bumpy ride

The network is not always reliable. Vantage is built to handle it — latency spikes, random 503s, whatever production looks like on a bad day. Failed requests retry on their own; nothing needs a manual refresh to recover. The [**Launch Control**](https://vantage-ui.com/examples/launch-control/) example proves it: its grids run against a deliberately hostile API and ride straight through.

## Vantage as an edge proxy

The resilience, and the ability to produce live API endpoints, make Vantage ideal as your regional "edge" proxy — or even a sidecar for your distributed application. Mechanisms include:

- Cache pre-warming on start
- Memory and persistent disk cache
- Decentralised patching and invalidation strategies
- Two-way — reads and eventual writes
- Custom change-conflict resolution
- Horizontally scalable
- Multithreaded
- WASM @ edge support (early access)

[Tour Launch Control](https://vantage-ui.com/examples/launch-control/) [Browse the examples](https://vantage-ui.com/examples/)

**Next rung:** one console is live — now wire every system and partner your business runs on into the same fabric. [Wire in a real-time data mesh →](https://vantage-ui.com/solutions/data-mesh/)