Hi,
Does anybody knows how several tens of display screens are refreshed each second in stock exchange buildings?
Of course the server pushes the data to each screen, bud is this custom technology or some well known technology like example MSMQ ?
Are there any study papers, books or something for the architecture of this kind of software ?
Regards
It tends to be proprietory software, with all the information providers (Reuters, Bloomberg etc.) supplying their own client libraries and/or applications. Most big banks (or at least the ones I've worked for) use Sun enterprise class servers, and Windows trading desk workstations.
I believe they use custom protocol through TCP/IP. Each display is connected to internal LAN network and requests for information as needed.
I believe this is generally referred to as Messaging. From RabbitMQ:
What is messaging? Messaging describes the sending and receiving of data (in the form of messages) between systems. Messages are exchanged between programs or applications, similar to the way people communicate by email but with guarantees on delivery, speed, security and the absence of spam.
A messaging infrastructure (a.k.a. message-oriented middleware, a.k.a. enterprise service bus) makes it easier for developers to create complex applications by decoupling the individual program components. Rather than communicating directly, the messaging infrastructure facilitates the exchange of data between components. The components need know nothing about each other’s status, availability or implementation, which allows them to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and turned off and on as required.
In adopting this architecture, the developer is insulated from the details of the various operating systems and network interfaces involved and the interoperability, scalability and flexibility of the application are improved.
Please see this presentation on Why you might need messaging for a general introduction or this page on Wikipedia for more information.
One popular paradigm for implementing messaging is publish/subscribe. Some implementations are implemented using point-to-point communication on TCP, some are using multicast on TCP/UDP.
For stock exchange displays, including other financial software that provides real-time prices, the prices are pushed to the clients rather than let them periodically request for the information (poll.) This is done to provide as near real-time prices as possible.