Client Applications

Front-end applications for your single-dealer platform

You're building your own single-dealer platform to offer pricing, analysis and execution to your clients over the Internet, so you need a front-end interface.

There is a choice of technologies you can use. Using Caplin Xaqua to build your single-dealer platform doesn't restrict your choice in any way; indeed Caplin Xaqua is designed to allow you to select one or more client-side technologies and then add to, or replace them as your business needs dictate.

Application or API?

Your first choice is whether you want your e-commerce system to connect directly into one of your clients' trading systems, via an API, or whether you want to present their traders with a trading interface in an application of some sort.

Caplin Xaqua supports both methods, and of course you can do both - the larger and more sophisticated of your clients have their own trading and messaging systems to which you want to connect. Obviously the API will be specific to your clients' system, but the technology in Caplin Xaqua makes interfacing to custom APIs straightforward without sacrificing performance.

Other clients will want you to provide them a trading application on their desktop.

RIA or "fat" application?

Conventionally remotely connected trading applications have been locally installed or "fat" applications. These applications are typically developed using Java or .NET. Caplin Xaqua provides APIs and SDKs for both Java and .NET applications.

However rolling out a "fat" application requires access to the client's machine with administrator privileges and installation of the application. This limits both the rate of on-boarding of new clients and the frequency with which changes and enhancements can be applied.

With the latest generation of web browsers it's becoming more usual to use a Rich Internet Application (RIA) which is a program running in a browser that looks, and behaves, as if it were locally installed.

Clearly if it runs in a browser, especially without any sort of plug-in, then rolling it out, onboarding new clients, and upgrading an enhancing the user experience (UX) becomes easy - a new copy of the application loads each time it's launched.

Flex, Silverlight or native browser functionality?

A full discussion of the pro's and con's of each RIA technology would more than fill this web page. However whichever of these technologies you choose (and you can choose more than one to run simultaneously if you want to offer a different UX for different audiences), Caplin Xaqua is able to support your choice. Caplin StreamLink is available for Flex (SL4F), for Silverlight (SL4SL) and for native browsers (SL4B) and offers interfaces to enable the RIA you deploy to access your pricing, trading and permissions services.

Caplin Systems has developed an RIA framework that uses the native browser capability: Caplin Trader. This contains grids, tickets, tiles and other components you'll need to develop your own RIA for Internet e-commerce. It also ships with a "reference implementation" which offers examples of how to implement the RIA and examples of different themes that you could adopt.