Building with Caplin
July 8, 2008
So, let’s imagine you’re building a brand new single dealer channel for your bank with Caplin Trader from Caplin Systems. You picked Caplin because it’s the clear leader in the streaming comet server space, and you want to deliver your etrading app into the browser so it’s zero install on the client desktop. There are other vendors with viable offerings that compete with Caplin’s Liberator as comet servers – Lightstreamer is the clear number two. There are interesting new vendors entering the sector like Kaazing, and there are open source products too. But none of them is as mature or as widely deployed in live production etrading apps as Caplin Liberator.
A server to stream live ticking prices to a browser is just one part of the puzzle of building a web 2.0 etrading app. You need to build the GUI in the browser, and you need an execution system that will handle RFQ/RFS. Unlike the other vendors Caplin provide this in the shape of the Caplin Trader GUI and the Trading Data Source. The GUI is based on the JavaScript widget kit from SoCentric, and the Trading Data Source provides configurable state machines that keep GUI and server side state in lock step during the lifetime of an RFQ ticket.
July 8, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Interesting post, but please let me add some clarifications, since in this article Lightstreamer appears less mature than Caplin.
Lightstreamer was created in 2000 and has 8 years of production maturity. It has been adopted and used in many mission-critical systems by the largest banks. The most long-lasting production case for Lightstreamer has been IntesaTrade (a bank part of Intesa Sanpaolo Group), where Lightstreamer Server has been running for 5+ years.
Lightstreamer has provided an applet-free approach since the beginning, while Caplin has relied on Java applets for many years, before switching to a pure JavaScript client.
Lightstreamer has been chosen by TIBCO Software as the core of their Ajax Message Service product (AMS), with an OEM license agreement.
Lightstreamer provides many advanced features beyond the Comet engine, such as: bandwidth management, frequency management, adaptive throttling, delta delivery, conflation, pre-filtering, meta-push, and a fine-grained permissioning system.
July 9, 2008 at 11:42 am
I’ve looked at these products for a couple of finance organisations recently and whilst I agree Caplin and Lightstreamer are the only serious games in town, Caplin is a long way ahead in terms of support for asset class trading and scalable market data and user management. Both offer more than just comet capabilities as is required in this market but Caplin’s integration capabilities are far superior in my view, particularly in security and latency controls. Caplin is a little more expensive but easily worth it. Not sure about TIBCO’s decision on their AMS offering but I can’t imagine they looked at Caplin properly. I’ve been in the markets for over 20 years now and remember using the energylive.com service from the IPE built on Caplin in 1998. I guess it did use Java somewhere but the main GUI was DHTML(Ajax), did browsers even support streaming Jscript then?
July 9, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Thanks for the compliments. You seem to have a good grasp of the value add of the Caplin solution. There is a lot more to creating an etrading app than the comet part, although that is usually at the core of the app. Lightstreamer provides a very good solution in the comet space, but as pointed out Caplin Trader is a whole lot more than just the comet server, both on the front end and the back end.
RobertD – I remember nearly breaking my back lifting the energylive server into the rack in 1998
July 20, 2008 at 10:17 am
> mission-critical systems
Oh
> etrading app
My
> security and latency controls
Word
You’re all kidding with these toys right?
Whilst these toys are okay for retail muppets you surely don’t think leadership is in AJAX?
The world you’re in takes HTTP as a laughing matter, Java as a piece of bloat, etc.
July 20, 2008 at 10:18 am
Good luck to all the users of those solutions..
Bound to lose money..
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August 22, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Sorry I missed this post earlier, but you might be interested to know that Kaazing has opened enrollment for its beta program to test drive Kaazing Enterprise Gateway. We would greatly appreciate your feedback.
http://www.kaazing.com/content/view/57/93/