Xignite Newsletter - September 2006 edition

2006 September edition
The World's Largest Source Of Financial Web Services
From the CEO's Desk It’s been more than a year since our last newsletter. I thought I would start by thanking our clients for putting their trust into our hands. I am constantly amazed how everyday, someone, somewhere in the world is coming up with another innovative way to make their company more profitable and competitive by implementing our web services. Xignite certainly owes its success to your collective creative powers. So thank you and please keep challenging us to make you more successful. Xignite’s web service adventure started almost four years ago when we published our first “demo” web services on the Web. Within days, prospective customers were pounding at the doors asking for us to come up with a subscription-based, commercial-strength version of those early services. After more door-pounding and a lot of work, we built an industrial-strength platform able to serve the most demanding applications. You quickly made us the largest provider of on-demand financial web services, serving upwards of 100 million requests a month to hundreds of clients around the world. Our solution now provides the broadest suite of financial web service packages available today on an on-demand platform. These services power an increasingly large and diverse number of mission critical service-oriented business applications. Based on your input, we added SEC filings, insider data, fundamentals, financials and many more to our initial delayed quote service. Following your demands we will soon be adding more. We also constantly add new features to existing services based on your requests. Due to the “plug-it-and-forget-it” nature of web services, it’s easy for our clients to miss on these additions. We plan to use this newsletter to keep you apprised of what’s new and what’s coming. Xignite entered the web service business because our clients asked us to. We intend to carry on this spirit as web services continue catching on and as we serve a larger and more demanding community of firms, developers, and partners. I look forward to getting your feedback and comments on how we can help you and your business be more successful. Please write to me at sdubois@xignite.com Stephane Dubois President and CEO, Xignite What’s Coming Because many of you keep asking for more, we have many services under development. Here are some of the things we will be releasing in the coming weeks: Pork Bellies, Wheat, Coffee, Copper, Aluminum, Sugar, etc. XigniteFutures is expanding in response to your demand for more commodities future information. In addition to NYMEX which has provided many clients with Crude Oil and Natural Gas prices (among others), we will be adding the delayed and historical quotes for the following exchanges shortly: New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CMERC) Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) New York Commodities Exchange (COMEX) Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) Winnipeg Commodity Exchange (WCE) Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX) If being competitive in your industry requires access to reliable, up-to-date information on raw materials and commodities, XigniteFutures is for you. Stay tuned for the next newsletter. There are many more upcoming services we have to tell you about. And if there is anything you need and don’t see on our site, don’t hesitate to let us know by email. What you tell us helps us identify and prioritize new developments. Who’s Hot Some of you might have heard about the McDonald’s Chipotle Exchange program. The Chipotle restaurant chain was started in Colorado, near the University of Denver in 1993. In 1997, McDonald's made an initial minority investment in the franchise. By 1999, it had grown to a controlling interest, and, by 2005, it was a whopping 92%. The McDonald's connection allowed the firm to quickly expand, from 14 restaurants in 1998 to 480 at the end of 2005. Chipotle went public on January 25, 2006, at a price of $22 per share. Chipotle stock rose exactly 100%, closing at $44.00 per share. On September 8, 2006 McDonald's Corp. announced it had started an offer for its shareholders to exchange McDonald's stock for shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill. In early August, McDonalds began looking for a reliable source for VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) information. Above all, they needed to rapidly build a web site that could provide the hundreds of thousands of McDonald’s shareholders with the information they needed to make their exchange decision. The exchange will allow McDonald's shareholders to acquire Chipotle shares at a 10 percent discount. Because it is so easy to integrate our web services into any application, and because time, accuracy, and performance were critical, McDonalds chose Xignite as a partner in this mission-critical project. The actual price of this multi-billion dollar transaction will be calculated using XigniteVWAP. To see the web service in action, check the ChipotleExchange web site. News & Events Experience AJAX, RIA, and Web 2.0 Knowledge and Best Practices at AJAXWorld Conference and Expo 2006 October 3 - 4, 2006 Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) & Web Services Strategies for Governing the Implementation of SOA, Increasing Business Agility and Reducing IT Integration Costs October 16 - 18, 2006 Intercontinental Buckhead, Atlanta, GA Building a Service Oriented Architecture with BPM and MDA October 16 - 19, 2006 Burlingame, CA USA Top Reads XML Schema 1.1 Part 1: Structures W3C Working Draft 31 August 2006 (Source www.W3C.org) Industry Trends: Building Rich Web Applications with Ajax (Source www.Computer.org) Syntext Serna and New Trends in XML Content Authoring (Source www.idealliance.org) AS2, ebXML, or SOAP: Which Messaging Standard to Select for Your Supply Chain and Why (Source www.idealliance.org) Close Ruby encounters of the .NET kind (Source: www.serverside.net) Web Services With Web 2.0 Interfaces Are Surging – Thanks to AJAX (Source webservices.sys-con.com)	What's new We have released quite a few new services in the last twelve months. Here are two: XigniteVWAP greatly simplifies trading compliance and delivers historical, delayed, and real-time Volume Weighted-Average Price information for US markets. This service enables you to pull VWAP data straight into your app and validate compliance on the fly. XigniteExchanges takes the pain out of tracking market holidays in your application. You can query this service at any time to find out whether any of the dozens of exchanges around the world are open. Just think of the failed processes you no longer have to worry about. Also, be on the lookout for our upgraded website which will roll out in the coming weeks. We look forward to your feedback on the improved usability and content of the site. What’s Hot XigniteQuotes remains one of our most popular services due to its versatile features. We have added several cool new features since many of you began using the service. For instance, did you know that? You can use XigniteQuotes to generate intraday charts? You can completely customize the look and feel of these charts? You can access up to 30 days of detailed intra-day tick information? If any of these features are relevant to you, there are several operations you should know about: GetDelayedChart returns a simple chart using our standard design. GetDelayedChartPreset returns a chart that we customized for you to get your specifications. All you need to do is pass the “Preset” value for your firm and you are ready to go. GetDelayedChartCustom is for the daring ones who want to customize the chart themselves. You can do that by accessing and customizing the Chart Design object using GetChartDesign. This object allows you to customize more than 120 attributes of the chart (from colors, to fonts, to legends and more). In addition to charts, XigniteQuotes lets you access intra-day ticks (or trades) for all securities. Actually intraday-ticks are the data used to draw the charts discussed above. There are a couple of ways you can access this data: GetTicks lets you query ticks for a range of time during the day. In addition, the operation lets you group ticks by range of time. For instance, you can request 1, 5 or 15-minutes ticks. GetHistoricalTicksAsOfDate works just like GetTicks but you can access up to 30 days of historical tick information, which we keep online exclusively for you. Developer Corner Authentication Demystified. The Xignite Platform supports multiple authentication methods. You can pick the one that’s right for you. Cookies. This method is used primarily when accessing our web services through the browser. While it can be used at the time of requesting data programmatically, it is indeed a bit cumbersome and we do not recommend it. When you register for the first time for a service, we create a cookie on your machine and we capture the IP address. This means that you are then able to access the service from the browser on that machine. If you ever lose a cookie, you can always add it back using the AddCookie operation using your browser. To learn more on this subject click here. HTTP Requests. This method applies well to those accessing our web services through straight HTPP request (i.e. not using SOAP). You can simply pass your username and password information using the following request parameters: Header_Username=<username> Header_Password=<password> To learn more on this subject click here. SOAP Header. Using a SOAP Header is our recommended approach for authenticating your requests (if you use SOAP of course). All our Web Services accept a standard SOAP Header called ‘Header’. This header provides multiple parameters, including Username and Password. Just set these variables to the correct values, assign the header to your service object and go. To learn more on this subject click here. IP. When everything else fails, your requests will be authenticated by IP address. Using IP-based authentication can be a problem when you move servers around or change ISP (This is where SOAP Headers come handy). Your processes could stop working when one of these changes occurs. The good news is that you can: Add as many IP addresses as you want to your account. Register IP addresses yourself by going here. Contact us at any time so that we can add new IP addresses for you. Career Section Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to be a part of it. If y ou are a mastermind of your own trade, looking for an early startup to sweat into an apparent overnight success, Xignite is for you! We are a small but thriving company growing full of smart and motivated people. We work hard and are passionate about changing the life of our clients and making the delivery of web services the business model of the future. For more information on Careers at Xignite click here.