Xignite Newsletter - September 2006 edition

2006 November Vol. 1
The World's Largest Source Of Financial Web Services
From the CEO's Desk Web services never cease to amaze me. In the early years, they were described as "just another interface", i.e. another tool in the bag of techno-tricks to integrate disparate applications. In contrast, it appears that web services will have a lasting impact on how businesses build and deploy applications. In fact they will be as central to application development in the next ten years as the web and the browser were in the last ten years. If you remember the Netscape IPO of 1995, you may recall that from that day on the applications we used on a day to day basis began to morph entirely. Our clunky windows and client-server apps of the 90’s gave way to web-based applications that delivered a whole new world of ease of use, accessibility, and flexibility. We became able to access tons of information from anywhere at any time without ever having to read a user manual. As the technology matured and the bandwidth broadened, we could perform the most complex tasks with speed and ease. Web services will have the same enduring impact, not on us as software users, but on the core processes that make up our businesses. Soon, application developers will be able to build highly adaptable applications by accessing oceans of web services and integrating them in less time it takes to buy a book from Amazon.com. It will fundamentally change the development speed and the fitness of tomorrow’s applications. Today, if you have a question, you open your browser, search, click and find the answer. Just like Bob Lamoureux with his settlement date problem below (see Who’s Hot below), developers facing a challenge will soon be able to search, point to a web service, and solve it in no time at all. And you can count on us to be the place to go to for all your financially-related application needs. Please write to me at sdubois@xignite.com Stephane Dubois President and CEO, Xignite What’s Coming There are many services currently under development and some of these will go live in the coming weeks: XigniteCalendar Xignite has partnered with Econoday, the leading provider of economic calendars, to deliver a web service version of their popular economic indicator calendar (take a peak at this one on Bloomberg). This service will be ideal for you to present business critical market announcements directly on your employee portals or on custom wireless applications. XigniteOptions We are working with the Option Price Reporting Authority to bring you delayed pricing information for options traded on any of the member exchanges (AMEX, BSE, CBOE, ISE, NYSE Arca, and PHLX). There are many more upcoming services so stay tuned for the next newsletter. If there is anything you need and don't find it on our website, don’t hesitate to email us. Your feedback helps us identify and prioritize new developments. Who’s Hot Bob Lamoureux is a bit of a legend in the connected world of FIX, the electronic trading protocol he co-authored in the early 90’s while working at Fidelity Investments. FIX (Financial Information eXchange), widely used across the global financial services industry, is used both by buy side institutions as well as sell side brokers/dealers in the financial markets to facilitate order execution. For the last few years, Bob has been consulting for large financial organizations in the Boston area with his firm, Advanced Technology Advisors, on various mission-critical projects. Recently, when implementing an Order Management platform for one of his clients, he ran into a problem: some of the trades sent to his clients missed settlement date information. While settlement dates can be easily calculated from the trade date, you need a solid and reliable market calendar to do so effectively. Rather than build one of his own (which he has done a few times in previous lives), Bob found it easier to use the XigniteExchanges service. With just a few minutes of programming, Bob was able to retrieve an accurate Settlement Date. The thought of never having to maintain that calendar was by-far the best thing. "That in itself made the service worth it." says Bob. "Anyone on Wall Street would be silly to build and maintain yet another exchange calendar. XigniteExchanges is just perfect for this type of application", he added. Top Reads Java Technology and Web Services (Source:http://java.sun.com) Migrating to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Source:http://www.eurocomms.co.uk) AJAX: The Easy Way (Source:http://ajax.sys-con.com)> The Seven Secrets of SOA Success (Source:http://webservices.sys-con.com) War of Web-Words: "It's Time for Web 2.0 to Stop Being Exclusive," (Source:http://xml.sys-con.com) An SOA call to arms (Source http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com) JavaScript Object Notation for Ajax Web Services (Source: http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com)	What's new Services listed below were released in the last twelve months: XigniteHoldings provides access to current and historical institutional holding information. This data is based on the 13F Filings money managers file with the SEC. XigniteCompensation Would you close more deals if you knew more about the top executives at your prospective client? XigniteCompensation gives you that edge. The service will soon deliver biographical and compensation information on more than 100,000 officers of public companies. Also, as mentioned in our previous newsletter, we have received approval from the following exchanges for redistribution of their delayed commodity prices. Check out XigniteFutures for the complete list: Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CMERC) Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBT) Winnipeg Commodity Exchange (WCE) Minneapolis Grain Exchange (MGEX) What’s Hot In our global economy, the impact of currency exchanges impacts almost everything we do. From international trade, to retail transactions, to employee travel expenses and industrial hedging, most business processes are deeply affected by foreign exchange. Foreign currency trading itself is increasingly becoming a fast growing industry. XigniteCurrency services provides real-time access to foreign exchange rates. The GetLatestCrossRate operation, returns a cross-rate (exchange rate) for a pair of currencies, and can be used by providing the following input parameters: From: The Source currency (for instance GB for British Pound) To: The target currency (and EUR for Euro) What you get back is a real time bid, ask, and mid rate corresponding to the most recent trade executed on one of hundreds of currency trading desks around the world. The service supports more than 170 different currencies. Tenfore, a leading worldwide provider of real-time market information, is our partner for this web service. Developer Corner Do you know that adding a chart to your web site or portal is as easy as adding an HTML tag? This is one of the best-kept secrets in our quiver of tricks. You can integrate a chart with your application using multiple methods: Call one of our chart operations to get access to the chart as a URL and use this URL to view the chart. Invoke one of our binary chart operations and get the chart image as a binary stream (actually an array of bytes), decode this stream back into an image, and use this image in you application. Use xChart to directly stream the content of an image into an <IMG> tag in your browser-based application The advantage of xChart is that it requires absolutely no programming. You simply create a dynamic URL specifying the type of data you want to chart (equities, futures, currencies, and rates), the symbol, the size of the chart or use any of the other parameters among the many available. You can use it to draw intraday charts, historical charts, and even yield curves. For example, you could simply add the following tag to an HTML page to get a 3 year price history for MSFT. <img src="http://www.xignite.com/xchart.aspx? Method=Binary&Type=Stock& SubType=Historical& Symbol=MFST &StartDate=10/26/2003&EndDate=10/26/2006"/> To make things easier, xChart comes ready with its own documentation. Check it today at http://www.xignite.com/xchart.aspx/ News & Events Web 2.0 Conference 7-9 November 2006, San Francisco Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit 4-6 December 2006, Orlando, FL, USA, Gaylord Palms™ Resort & Convention Center The 4th IEEE European Conference on Web Services 4-6 December 2006, Zurich, Switzerland XML 2006 5-7 December 2006, Sheraton Boston Hotel, Boston, USA Career Section Web services will rule the world in the near future. It will be an exhilarating experience to be an integral part of it. If you are a master 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.