“I’ve been working in software development for the financial industry for over 15 years, both for European and US markets. There were many data feeds protocols and APIs passing through my dev environment, starting with market data received through TV teletext service and satellite antennas and continuing with the Internet feeds that are so common now. I’ve developed on almost every single datafeed in United States; Sungard, Comstock, Tenfore/Morningstar, Quote.com, eSignal, IQFeed, Hyperfeed, Activ Financial are the ones I can recall. I remember reading hundreds of pages of documentation sometimes spread in three or even more separate documents, with tens of appendixes and tables. I remember trying to navigate through the mess of DLLs and EXEs that some of them provided as part of their API. I remember trying to understand their sample apps, some of them including ten or more source and header files. If you don’t wish to have memories such as these (many times accompanied by frustration) and you wish to have unlimited data passing through your dev environment – NxCore is for you.
My first experience was during the installation. I ran NxCore Setup and it finished a second after I clicked the install button. To be honest, I was initially thinking something went wrong and the installation silently failed – I couldn’t believe it actually installed a very powerful engine. My next experience was running it: it was running in 10MB of memory, not moving one byte more or less, and consuming zero CPU, while downloading and streaming the whole US stock and futures market on my desktop computer over a regular internet connection!
I wasn’t surprised anymore when I saw that the documentation and the samples were incredible simple and straight forward. I was able to connect to the stream and process trades and quotes in my application within a half hour of coding – but this time I just expected it: after seeing how it installs, how it runs, and how incredible simple everything is, it was just it’s natural flow. While coding my applications, many times I’ve thought to myself “it would be great if NxCore would provided this…” …and bang!, after checking the documentation more carefully, it was already there! The NxCore access component and APIs are not only super-optimized, but were designed with always having in mind how the developers using it can optimize their code too. Forget about lookups through collections and dynamic memory allocation, which are killers for a real-time application: if you use NxCore at its full capacity, you don’t need even one single lookup, nor allocating one single byte of memory for an entire, 24-hour market day.
An impressive and extremely helpful feature is the ability to replay a specific market day. Imagine that you have an application that crashed in production, malfunctioned or underperformed during a certain period of a hectic market day. Normally you would have to spend a lot of time to investigate the issue by inspecting log files and crash reports and detecting the cause (if you’re lucky). Too many times however the developer is left to guess the problem, attempt a fix and wait for another similar event to occur – and we know that exact same event will never occur. This is not the case if you run NxCore. You can replay that specific market day in QA how many times you want, until you recreate and fix the real problem.
I’m totally impressed by how much this small component can do. Never have I seen such simplicity and such power delivered with such a small footprint and using so few resources. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to use NxCore.”