Financial Market Data Web Services - Xignite Blog » Technology

5 Minute Developer: How to Build a Real-Time Stock Quote Widget in 5 Minutes

ChasCooper — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:00:22 +0000

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:

</span>Get Real-Time Quote<span style="color: #339966">

$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.

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5 Minute Developer: How to Build a Currency Converter in 5 Minutes

ChasCooper — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:00:31 +0000

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.

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The Winds Of Change Are Blowing In The Clouds Favor

Landon Long — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:35:25 +0000

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.

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Causing Depth & Disruption Wherever We Go!

ChasCooper — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:22:14 +0000

I really liked how Max Bowie characterized Xignite as “disruptive” in a piece he published in Inside Market Data earlier this week, entitled “Appetite for Disruption.” He was covering our latest release of equity options web services XigniteOptions and XigniteRealTimeOptions, but his “disruptive” moniker couldn’t be more appropriate for all of Xignite as a company.

He dubbed us as “disruptive” because our equity options services changed the economics of getting options data so much that customers like iVerit are now able to create new businesses delivering this high-volume, high-expense market data at rates affordable even to small private investors over small, affordable devices like the iPhone.

But the truth is that virtually every time we launch a new web service, we see this pattern of disruptive technology creating new opportunities to penetrate existing markets much more deeply. That’s because it’s the on-demand delivery model itself, not any particular web service, that creates the order-of-magnitude changes in economics that cause disruption and new opportunities to deepen existing markets.

So thanks to Max for giving us a rep as a high-tech company running amok causing market depth and disruption wherever we go.

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Xignite Launches New Global Currency/Forex Section

Landon Long — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:00:28 +0000

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.

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2009 SIFMA TMC: Smaller Show . . . Bigger Buzz

Landon Long — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:02:25 +0000

Everyone has been talking about how much smaller this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference was when compared with previous years, fewer exhibitors and fewer attendees. But for Xignite, this year’s show was the biggest ever. If you missed us at this year’s SIFMA TMC, we hope to see you next year. Feel free to take a look at the 2009 Xignite SIFMA TMC Photo Gallery by Clicking Here.

Despite the fact that this year’s SIFMA Show was scaled down quite a bit, we were positively overwhelmed with demand at the Xignite booth. Our staff of seven was slammed every minute they were on the floor, answering questions, giving product demos and handing out free Xignite goodies. Even after show hours were over, our booth stayed filled with people wanting to talk about on-demand web services. Even when walking the halls, I overheard many others talking about Xignite, our cool new products and exciting activities that we were sharing at the show. In retrospect, I wish we had brought a staff of twelve to handle all the demand.

Maybe it was just the Xignite shot machine and free booze we passed out. For me, it was fun demonstrating how it’s a lot easier & cheaper to get data “by the glass” (aka on-demand) rather than getting data “by the fire hose” (aka bulk files and data feeds). If it was alcohol that brought the hordes a-knocking at our booth, that would give a whole new meaning to the phrase, “generating buzz.”

Or maybe we saw so much demand because people just couldn’t resist the power of our free t-shirts, pens, mouse pads and other freebies. Maybe it was the awesome VIP Event that we hosted at the Forbes Galleries. Or perhaps everyone heard about us from the recent publicity surrounding Xignite, like the amazing coverage in Inside Market Data or product announcements surrounding XigniteOnDemand and XigniteCorporateActions.

In truth, I don’t think any amount of publicity, bribery or booze could have generated the amount of buzz we saw. Having talked to many at the show, I got a strong sense that people are more serious than ever about finding game-changing technology, like on-demand web services. Over and over again I heard people looking for way to simplify data projects, dramatically cut costs and reduce the time it takes to delivery new data initiatives to market. In these categories, Xignite is the only show in town.

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Market Data Feeds vs. Web Services – Why buy the cow?

Joel York — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:12:23 +0000

Many of the folks visiting our website looking for market data have previous experience with more traditional (or as we like to say legacy) data feed technology, but have not used Web services. Or, they are new to market data in general and have difficulty cutting through all the technical detail and marketing-speak to make an honest appraisal of what is best for their application. If this sounds like you, then take a look at this quick side-by-side comparison below.

To make a sound business decision, you need to ask yourself the practical question of “Why should I buy the cow, when I can get the milk through the fence?” In truth, there can be very good reasons for buying the cow. For example, you drink an awful lot of milk. Or, maybe you are also a really big meat eater. But, if your business isn’t dairy farming, then you are usually better off just buying the milk.

Contrasting On-demand Web Services and Data Feeds

(click on the image to enlarge)

Following this analogy, let me state out front that Web services are NOT right for every application. If you are developing an algorithmic trading program that requires very low latency custom pricing data, or you belong to a gigantic financial institution that has a massive, centrally provisioned data feed, a strategic SOA initiative, and an IT department chock full of C++ programmers just waiting around for their next integration project, then you probably don’t need web services. However, if writing custom data parsers is not your forte and fooling around with market data is not the core competency of your business, but merely a means to a higher value end, then we may have just what you need.

One often confusing element that is worth clarifying is that on-demand Web services are not only Web services, they are also on-demand. That is, many market data vendors bundle application programming interfaces (APIs) in wih their feed products (often as a free add-on). And, some of these APIs may support Web service standards or at least provide XML formatted output. However, this does not change the business economics of buying data in bulk and deploying and managing the infrastructure to host and distribute it yourself, versus accessing it one transaction at a time over the Internet.

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All You Need Is A Good Clean SOAP Toolkit

StephaneDubois — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 02:21:29 +0000

I am a late comer to the SOAP vs. REST debate, mainly because this blog started after the battle began raging. But a recent post by Raymond Yee–who is writing a book about mashups–suggested a reaction.

Raymond’s main point is that SOAP requires a developer to have deep knowledge of the protocols (WSDL and SOAP) to use web services effectively and that it is "so much easier to get started with REST."

I disagree violently. The knowledge of SOAP and WSDL you need all depends on the SOAP toolkit you use.

I’ll take an analogy; Do we require internet users to know HTML to navigate the web? No we don’t. On the client side, the browser takes care of turning HTML into beautiful usable web pages. If end users had to read HTML pages in plain text they would find the web very obscure indeed.

On the server side, if you are writing your HTML by hand, you will definitely need to know the details of the protocol. But if you use a good advanced IDE that lets you write pages in a WYSIWYG fashion, you can build a web site without knowing anything about HTML.

So it all depends on the tools (client and server side) and how well they hide the protocol from you.

If you want to write a web service by hand, you will have to know SOAP and WSDL. If you use a good toolkit, all you have to do is write a function call and you have a web service. If you want to consume a web service without a good SOAP toolkit, you will have to learn the standards but not otherwise.

We have written dozens of web services which collectively have served billions of SOAP requests to hundreds of firms around the world yet we have never read the SOAP specs and we can barely read a WSDL by hand. All we had to do was to write meaningful function calls (which is an art in itself).

Our clients who use good SOAP toolkit can go from pointing to our WSDLs to consuming data in their application in less than 60 seconds without a hint of what the protocols are about. This is not something you can do with REST yet (WADL might be able to change that).

Clients who come to us with more primitive languages will tend to spend more time working out the details of the integration.

It seems that SOAP’s bad rap comes from those who just have not wanted to use more advanced SOAP toolkits.

It’s very sad indeed. It is as if back in 1996 we had abandoned the promise of the web and stopped building web pages because a bunch of people insisted in using a text editor instead of a browser to open HTML pages and complained about how unreadable this HTML was. Come on.

To his credit, Raymond is very open to being convinced. He wants to "be shown where my thinking is wrong and how I can start using SOAP and WSDL with ease in PHP, Python, etc."

Unfortunately, and with due respect to the fantastic tools PHP and Pythons are, they are not on the top of my list of the "better SOAP toolkits"–at least in their editor form. We had to handhold too many developers using those to have them make the cut. I suppose that if you use a nice IDE on top of those, things are easier. But they don’t require you to know SOAP and WSDL to make them work.

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