The Developer Focus series profiles developers who have built applications using Xignite’s Cloud APIs, highlighting their experiences, observations, and advice.

John Morris is the lead developer and CTO for StockTouch, an innovative financial market data visualization app that is currently the #1 paid financial app in the iTunes Store (read more about StockTouch in our recent Customer Spotlight).

StockTouch’s groundbreaking data visualization interface has received widespread attention from the media and from Apple, who have selected StockTouch as one of the few apps to be loaded on all iPads and iPhones in their Apple Stores worldwide.  We recently sat down with John to learn more about him and the development process behind StockTouch.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your background?

John Morris – I’ve been programming since 1981, mostly as a contractor. My primary focus has been the gaming industry, mainly for two reasons. First, I love games! But perhaps more importantly, game development requires optimizing code at all levels in order to ensure good performance. It’s a challenge I enjoy taking on.

Q: How did you get involved with StockTouch?

John Morris – I learned about the StockTouch project through a mutual friend.  I joined the project initially as a consultant to build the prototype.  As everything came together, I was offered and accepted a position as the co-founder and CTO of StockTouch.

Q: How is the development process for StockTouch structured?

John Morris – The StockTouch team is completely virtual with the core members in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. There are actually only two of us who are involved on the coding side of StockTouch. I work on the client side, and we have a contractor who works on the server side. We also work very closely with the other members of the team that deal with the overall user experience and feature set.

To build StockTouch, I was initially given just six screenshots, but we always had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to do. We wanted the app to have a very intuitive interface with a fluid user experience. As a game developer, I personally wanted the application to offer a superior and unique visual experience, backed by extremely powerful features. StockTouch performs its rendering via OpenGL, and we really push the graphical capabilities of the iPad to deliver a cutting-edge experience.

Q: How difficult was the transition to the iOS platform?

John Morris – I’ve been building iOS products since 2008, so it wasn’t an issue for me.  For programmers unfamiliar with iOS, transitioning to the platform is not very easy—there’s a steep learning curve involved. There are hurdles to development, such as the preferred language being Objective C, dealing with a new set of APIs and navigating the performance and memory limitations. That said, if you manage to get past the learning curve, it provides a very powerful and robust platform.

Q: Any advice for iOS developers?

John Morris – I think a lot of developers are getting it wrong when they try to build for iOS. They just try to push versions of desktop applications out. Developers need to look at the platform as a whole. It’s a different paradigm. The usability is totally different from a desktop or a laptop. The touch and gesture features are very powerful tools.  They define the iOS experience, so you have to think in terms of the mobile environment.

Q: How did the Xignite Cloud APIs help you?

John Morris – Our forte is the front end. We’re a small company and wanted to stay lean. Xignite is our one stop shop for all the financial market data we need. The main advantage Xignite offered us was that the market data is already sitting in a large persistent database.

We just make web service calls, parse it and then pass the data on to our users.  That reduced our requirements for the server side, enabling us to shorten our development timelines.  Plus, working with a single data source with a solid and consistent API structure is definitely a good thing.

Q: How do you plan to meet the requirements of your fast growing customer base?

John Morris – For a financial application, the primary concern is ensuring that users get access to timely financial market data the instant they want to see it.

To address this, we have implemented several custom compression/encoding algorithms. This ensures that our data is distributed in a timely fashion and we can meet the requirements of a large and growing user base.

Q: What are StockTouch’s plans for the future?

John Morris – Going forward, we plan to beef up the application. We would like to add more analytical features, statistics like alpha, beta and candlestick charts.  New security classes such as ETFs are on the way as well. We’re also looking to add layers of personalization so that users can view analytics specifically related to their own portfolios.

Ultimately, our goal is to come up with a suite of financial applications, based on our data visualization competency, that are easy to use and help spread financial awareness for both professional and non-professional users.

Like many of us, you may have run into challenges when importing real-time market data in Excel, Visual Studio & SQL Server. With the recent addition of Xignite Financial Market Data to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace Datamarket, users can now pull live stock quotes directly into Microsoft Excel 2010, develop data rich applications using Visual Studio 2010 and seamlessly populate backend database with SQL Server 2010.

In late 2010, Xignite and Microsoft teamed up to make XigniteBATSLastSale, a real-time stock quote data service, available through the Azure Marketplace Datamarket, with the addition of other datasets scheduled to rollout in the months ahead. With this, Microsoft users can obtain instant online access to real-time stock quotes from the BATS Exchange. Now everyone from hardcore mobile app developers to garage based startups can obtain access to the same professional grade APIs to power their applications.

New to Xignite is the addition of OData, or Open Data Protocol, a method of querying and updating data which unlocks the data from the silos that exist in legacy applications. Today, OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

Wes Yanaga with Microsoft’s Channel 9 sat down with Shoshanna Budzianowski (SQL Azure) and Chas Cooper (Xignite) to get the low down on what this partnership is all about, and how it will benefit end user around the globe.

After the Channel 9 video was completed, Shoshanna Budzianowski sat down with Marc Bollinger, Web Service Engineer at Xignite, for some one-on-one developer talk and a bit of programming fun (CLICK MORE to see developer video)

Looking forward, Xignite has plans to put the vast majority its data onto the Azure DataMarket. “We have started with our most popular data sets, but will continue to add data until the market is satisfied with what Xignite is offering” said Chas Cooper, VP of Product management at Xignite.

Microsoft brings a very horizontal market to Xignite, with DataMarket providing broad coverage across different verticals. When Microsoft looked for companies to work with on Data Market, two things attracted Microsoft to Xignite; 1) the fact that Xignite understands how to deliver on-demand market data and financial web services” and 2) out of all the financial data providers evaluated for Azure Datamarket, Xignite has the most reasonable, rational terms of use across its data sets. Xignite also uses standards such as SOAP, REST & JSON to make integrate with Xignite’s web services simple and straight forward.

Developers should visit http://datamarket.azure.com, where they can type Xignite into the search bar there and see all of the services available. More information is available at www.xignite.com.

Henry Ford once said: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” Then, in 1923 Alfred Sloan came along and cleaned his clock by offering a tremendous variety in colors and models. But, Sloan didn’t do it one customer at a time. GM redesigned its manufacturing line with the flexibility to produce a multitude of models and colors without compromising the inherent economies-of-scale of Ford’s assembly line innovation—a practice that today has evolved into the concepts of flexible manufacturing and mass customization.

What does any of this have to do with cloud computing? And for that matter, what does it have to do with financial market data? This is the third post in a series called “Thinking Out Cloud” with the aim of helping financial services and market data IT professionals charged with developing cloud computing strategies separate the cloud buzz from the cloud reality. This post explores the important idea of mass customization in the cloud and its relevance to market data management.

Mass Customization and Market Data

According to Wikipedia, mass customization is about providing “services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency” by offering a “tremendous increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs.” Or rather, have it your way at a cost you can afford. In the last installment in this series entitled Thinking Out Cloud – The Market Data Sweet Spot, I pointed out that the best way to identify market data that can benefit from cloud computing is to look for data that is hard-to-use, hard-to-manage, and hard-to-access. Mass customization on the cloud strikes at the core of the “hard-to-use” problem by replacing inflexible data feeds and files in static formats with financial Web services that allow applications to select and consume highly customized market data sets on the fly.

Mass Customization, Meta Data and Web Services

In software, mass customization is achieved by converting hard-coded application functions into meta-data, so that the functional behavior of the software can be controlled through data on an ad-hoc basis. For example, the only real difference between this Xignite WordPress blog and a million other WordPress blogs comes down to a few theme files and the store of data that comprises the brilliant blog posts within. The posts in turn get shuffled around the Internet using RSS (really simple syndication). The RSS standard lies at the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution, powering the distribution of widely varied content such as blogs, news, friends, tweets, music, video, etc., all because a few abstract meta-data elements like “title”, “description”, and “link” can be generalized to contain an enormous and disparate variety of data. Swapping out this data can literally change one blog to any other blog (or one friend to any other friend!).

In cloud computing, meta-data abstraction is realized through Web services (like RSS). Web services take the concept of configurability through meta-data abstraction to its natural limit, because every operation of a Web service is inherently abstracted to meta-data in the XML inputs and outputs of the API. For example, the Xignite delayed stock quote Web service allows applications to retrieve a single quote for a single symbol, multiple quotes for multiple symbols, intraday tick-by-tick prices, market volume and news, simply by varying the Web service operation and the input parameters, i.e., the meta data. Providing access to such a wide variety of information in an ad-hoc fashion from a statically formatted feed or file is simply not possible without lots of hardware, software and custom development–most likely to create a Web service.

Wrap it Up, I’ll Take It!

More plainly, market data Web services are built for mass customization, because they cleanly wrap the underlying market data and data management infrastructure in meta-data enabling highly customized output based on variable input. Therefore, applications that require highly varied, ad-hoc market data subsets will be better served by Web services over the static formats of data feeds and files. Or, as we like to say at Xignite: “There’s an op[eration] for that!”

If you look at our new corporate bond master service, XigniteBondMaster, you’ll quickly see that you can use it to get information for over 125,000 U.S. corporate bonds, including issuer information, maturity dates, coupon rates and so on.  But you’re not likely to see one of the best features of the service until you roll up your sleeves and start digging around in the data:  the ability to look up official CUSIP identifiers with remarkable ease.

CUSIP identifiers are highly valued throughout the industry as the de facto standard for uniquely identifying over 9.1 million financial instruments.  And now you can easily look up CUSIPs for thousands of corporate bonds using XigniteBondMaster.  Interested in a particular issue, but not sure what its CUSIP is?  Try looking it up by the bond issuer!  Or just look it up by bond name.

All CUSIP data comes from CUSIP Global Services, an organization managed by Standard & Poor’s on behalf of the American Bankers Association specifically to oversee the official set of CUSIP identifiers.

You do need to have an agreement in place with CUSIP Global Services in order to receive CUSIP data, since this is highly valued data that must be licensed first.  But once you have an agreement in place, CUSIPs will automatically start appearing in your XigniteBondMaster outputs.

In the next 5 minutes, you could get $5 worth of plumbing services, $30 worth of legal advice or $17 worth of psychotherapy. Or, you could just spend your next five minutes building a real-time stock quote widget. Don’t think it can be done in 5 minutes? Check out a video showing us doing it in less time.

Here’s how you can do the same thing using PHP and Eclipse, although the same basic process can be used for any language and any IDE:

Step 1: Subscribe to XigniteRealTime to get access to real-time, Level I stock quotes. If you’re not ready to subscribe yet, you can also sign up for a free trial and get access to other real-time stock quote web services such as XigniteNASDAQLastSale and XigniteBATSLastSale. You’ll need to make a few adjustments to the sample code below to point to a different web service, but nothing major.

Step 2: Start a new PHP project in Eclipse.

Step 3: Create your index.php page with the following code:

<html><title>Get Real-Time Quote</title><body><form>

<input type=“text” name=“symbol” />

<input type=“submit” value=“Go” />

</form></body></html>

<?php

$client = new SoapClient(‘http://www.xignite.com/xRealTime.asmx?WSDL’);

$quote = $client->GetRealQuote(array(‘Exchange’ => “INET”, ‘Symbol’ => $_GET["Symbol"], ‘IncludeBidAsk’ => “false”));

echo “Last price: “, $quote->GetRealQuoteResult->Last;

?>

Step 4: Open a browser and load your index.php page to give your new stock quote widget a spin.

Congratulations! You just built a real-time stock quote widget in PHP and made a plumber, a lawyer and a psychotherapist very disappointed in you for such a ridiculous waste of your time.

Every five minutes, a business in the U.S. catches fire, someone in the UK swears, and a clock that took 5 years and £1 million to build before being unveiled by none other than Stephen Hawking, finally tells the time accurately for a second or two.

What will you do with your next 5 minutes?

Here’s a thought: Why not build a real-time forex currency converter? Sound like fun? If so, give it a try using the steps below. Or, if you’d rather leave all the fun to someone else, why not just watch a video of us doing it?

Here’s how it’s done:

Step 1: Start a new Windows application project in Visual Studio.

Step 2: Create a Web reference to http://www.xignite.com/xCurrencies.asmx?WSDL and call it XigniteCurrenciesService.

Step 3: On the Form1 design, drag and drop 3 text boxes, 2 labels, and a button, arranging them as shown in the picture. From left to right, give the text boxes the following names and default text: inputBaseAmount defaulting to 1000, inputBaseSymbol defaulting to USD, inputQuoteSymbol defaulting to EUR. One label should have a big equal sign in it and the other should have the name of labelQuoteAmount and zero for its text property. The button should read “Convert.”

Step 4: Double-click the button to create its click event handler, and give it the following 3 lines of code:

XigniteCurrenciesService.XigniteCurrencies XigniteCurrenciesWebService = new XigniteCurrenciesService.XigniteCurrencies();

XigniteCurrenciesService.ExchangeConversion Quote = XigniteCurrenciesWebService.ConvertRealTimeValue(inputBaseSymbol.Text, inputQuoteSymbol.Text, double.Parse(inputBaseAmount.Text));

labelQuoteAmount.Text = Quote.Result.ToString();

Step 5: Compile and run.

Authentication trouble? If you get an authentication error, it means you’re not being authenticated from a cookie or your IP address. Don’t worry. Just add 3 more lines after the first line of code to pass your authentication key through SOAP. Be sure to replace MYAUTHENTICATIONKEY with your own Xignite account authentication key. (Don’t have an authentication key? Just sign up to get one. Your e-mail will be your initial authentication key.)

XigniteCurrenciesService.Header objHeader = new XigniteCurrenciesService.Header();

objHeader.Username = “MYAUTHENTICATIONKEY”;

XigniteCurrenciesWebService.HeaderValue = objHeader;

Congratulations! You just spent the last five minutes far more productively than one U.S. business, one citizen of the UK, and one very expensive but very inaccurate clock.

A few years back, if you asked your IT professionals about Cloud Computing, you probably would have received a blank stare, followed up with an “I love my servers” comment. At that time, even the term “Cloud Computing” was plagued by confusion, uncertainty and a fair amount of misinformation. Early misconceptions were further reinforced by the many ‘cloud flavors’ being lumped into one term, SaaS, PaaS, utility computing, virtualized computing, managed services, resource computing, elastic computing and so on. Many concluded that Cloud Computing was more a buzzword than a definable technology.

Today, that is no longer the case, with an overwhelming consensus affirming that the winds of change are blowing in the clouds favor. The desire to move into the clouds is quickly turning into a necessity, with a wide range of internal and external forces leading the charge. Redundancy, efficiency, availability, simplicity, stability or plain & simple economics, every entity has its own unique set of reasons for moving into the clouds. With its inherent time and cost benefits, It’s no surprise that there is a growing wave of support for Cloud Computing, with some of that support coming from some unlikely places.

Recently, a once reserved Gartner highlighted the benefits of cloud computing, stating; “The technologies that CIOs are prioritizing in 2010 are technologies that can be implemented quickly and without significant upfront expense, instead of investing millions of dollars to get millions in benefits, with these technologies, up front investments are measured in thousands of dollars to get those same benefits”. In the same report, where the opinions of 1586 CIO’s were polled, it was discovered that there has been a dramatic shift in global technical priorities. Amazingly, the #1 technological priority for the past five years has all but dropped off the list, being replaced by Virtualization & Cloud Computing.

In addition to the CIO’s of the world, another area where Cloud Computing is gaining serious momentum is within the U.S. Government. It is clear that one of the world’s largest political entities is doing more than assessing the clouds viability, but rather, running down the path towards broad adoption. In a revealing interview with Information Week, Obama’s Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra stated: “The cloud computing investment in the 2010 budget reflects the administration’s desire to drive down costs, drive innovation across the federal government, [and] make sure we’re making available technologies to the workforce”.

While the executive branch of the Government is currently in the late planning to early implementation stages, other agencies within the government have already moved into the clouds. Among the front-runners are NASA’s NEBULA Cloud Computing Project, the Defense Information Systems Agencies DoD RACE Cloud, the Department of Homeland Security Cloud Strategy, and a handful of other agency-drive initiatives. One of the more exciting initiatives is the GSA’s approach to centralizing approved Cloud Computing Vendors, as well as plans for the agency to become the central clearinghouse for government backed private, public and semi-public cloud based applications and computing capabilities. To jump-start this effort, the Obama Administration, in conjunction with the GSA, launched www.APPS.gov, an all new centralized government storefront for everything cloud service related. It is apparent that cloud based technologies are becoming so prolific, even the U.S. Government is getting on-board!

While private, public and governmental initiatives are a good sign of progress in the Cloud Services segment, other sure-fire indicators include innovation and investment. In addition to the hundreds of millions invested by leading cloud service providers like Amazon, Google and others, Microsoft and HP have put their hats into the ring with a USD $250 million investment in Cloud Computing. This extended partnership is aimed at building a new cloud based ‘infrastructure-to-application’ service that will “transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers”, tackling both the expansion and innovation of cloud services in a single leap. According to Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Balmer; “This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership”.

Worldwide, there are countless examples of how Cloud Services are re-shaping the way we think about our computing needs, but some industries are moving slower than others towards adopting this disruptive technology. The Financial Data Industry, with its transpiring low latency arms race and troubling regulatory concerns, has all but shunned the Cloud Computing paradigm, citing a host of philosophical concerns, and boasting the perceived benefits of over-spending on data acquisition technologies.

It’s no surprise that the one Financial Data Provider that has integrated Cloud Computing technologies into its delivery model, is growing at break-neck speeds.  It’s on-demand delivery method provides professional financial market data to customers in more than 5o countries around the globe, saving serious time and money in the process. While some data vendors are holding tight to their legacy delivery methods, it’s good to know that there is at least one Financial Data Provider that can see into the clouds, and is embracing the future with open arms.

What does the Albanian Lek, Dominican Peso, Indonesian Rupiah and 140 other global currencies have in common?  They can all be found in the newly updated XigniteCurrencies section.  Redesigned from the ground up, the new currencies section has been expanded to provide the tools and information necessary to get up and running with Global Currency Data.

In addition to covering over 85% of the world’s currencies, there are several improvements that we are very excited about.  First, we have expanded the section to include two new areas, one dedicated to providing detailed product information, and the other dedicated to providing comprehensive developer resources.  We have simplified the sites navigation, while also adding cool new features including several educational videos, expanded product information and an entirely new set of interactive demo applications.  We have even created a step-by-step video on how to get up and running with a simple real-time currency converter.  If you haven’t visited the section recently, you should give it a peek.

Product Resources - Currency Overview - - What Is On-Demand - - Live Forex Demos - - Global Data Coverage -

Developer Resources - How-To Video - - Getting Started - - Forex WSDL File - - Web Service Operations -

What’s most exciting are the countless ways our global currency data can be used. Our customers have proven that it doesn’t matter if you’re an Aviation Catering Company, Armored Transportation Service, National Menswear Retail Chain, Global Automotive Manufacturer or Cool Online Gaming Startup, with XigniteCurrencies, the applications are truly endless.

SOAP has had a little bit of bad rap lately. Some people think it is too complicated compared to its cousins REST and POX (plain old XML). The truth is that it all depends on the development environment you use. To prove our point, Xignite made this video that shows how you can integrate a web service in your application in less than 60 seconds and 3 lines of code. Watch it on YouTube:

Here is a higher quality Flash Version.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with the senior IT management team of one of one of the countries’ largest commercial banks. This was an open, round table discussion involving multiple Silicon Valley startup companies who—like us—try to woo similar-sized enterprises into using their latest and coolest wares. The CTO started saying that in the old days, standard software was supposed to meet 80% of a firm’s need, with the remaining 20% requiring customizations to fit the firm’s process. “With packaged software these days”, he said “it is more like 50%/50%. This forces us to spend a lot of time customizing things, while we are actually trying to be more agile and more responsive to changing market conditions.”

This comment struck a chord with me. Many IT executives now understand that re-usable web services finally offer the promise to address those changing needs. Instead of buying a standard app that only does 50% of the job, the firm can build a custom application from re-usable web services. If you can buy most of the services you need, you get the best of both worlds: the fit of
a custom app for less than the price of a standard app.

That’s all nice and good, but there is a big assumption built in: you must be able to purchase most of the services you need without having to customize them much. Otherwise you are back to where you started. And there lies the problem with the state of the web service industry today. Dana Gardner made it clear on his ZDNet blog last month: “There are either not many services available or the services are too general and not specific to a specialized vertical industry or a niche function.”. Dana further states that 80% of those services need to be customized. This type of problem could seriously hamper the success of composite applications in IT America.

Since we have been delivering web services for a while, we saw that problem coming a while back. This is why we not only offer a broad and deep set of integrated web services sharply focused on a specialized industry and function (financial market and industry data–in case you did not notice), but we also engineer those services with the needs of the composite application designer and developer in mind. Our goal is to make those re-usable components so integration-ready that you just have to drop them “as-is” in your composite applications. We still have ways to go, but we will get
there.

And what’s the payoff you say? Gardner again puts it best: “The higher [developers] can drive the percentage of reuse, the more scale and productivity they gain. They become the go-to organization for cost-efficient applications in a specific industry, or for specialized business processes.”