Monday 19 April 2010

Advanced Functionalities For FIX Log Analyzer.

In the past days we have added some beta functionality to the FIX Log Analyzer.

For the average user nothing has changed. The GUI remains the same, but under the carpet...

You can now add parameters to the FIX Log Analyzer URL.  Valid parameters are fixOnly, match and skip. match and skip are mutually exclusive and must not be used together.

fixOnly - ensures that only the FIX messages in the log are printed.
match and skip - specify one or more tag=value pairs so to include/exclude FIX messages

Here are some examples:

http://www.validfix.com/fix-log-analyzer.html?fixOnly
- Prints only fix messages and nothing else from the log.

http://www.validfix.com/fix-log-analyzer.html?match=35=8
- Explodes only ExecutionReport fix messages (35=8)

http://www.validfix.com/fix-log-analyzer.html?skip=35=0,35=A
- Explodes any fix message but heartbeats and logon messages.

http://www.validfix.com/fix-log-analyzer.html?skip=35=0,35=A&fixOnly
- Prints only fix messages exploding any but heartbeats and logon messages.

Other common usages are filtering out by sender or receiver component 49=...  56= ... or by specific values on a specific message. e.g ?match=35=8,1=RNZ  would match executionReports of a specific account.

For the time being, we have decided against enriching the FIX Log Analyzer page to allow users to fill fields and click radio buttons so to generate the above urls or similar ones.

We like the simplicity of our pages and we don't want to put off any new user with the advanced functionality. So, for now, if you want to use these features you will have to handcraft the url.

There is also another reason. We are not sure if there are other features you would want us to add, so before going much further we would like to hear from our users.

Depending on your feedback, I would expect we can add a few more useful options, improve the existing ones and later on a little gui panel to configure the user's applications.

Thanks for reading this

Friday 16 April 2010

Interesting sites for FIX protocol users.

Excluding the official FIX protocol site  what are good sites for people who work with the FIX protocol ?

Generally any FIX vendor's site since they tend to have short tutorials or general documentation about FIX.
In that sense one of my favourite is:  firstfuturessoftware's website.

One of their documents on fix messages helped us when we were developing our FIX Analyzer.

Few days ago, I stumbled upon a newly launched site: tradebreaker.com. The site is an internet forum for people with an interest in FIX with potential to grow big.

Saturday 3 April 2010

Comparing a few browsers

Building a high performance Rich Internet Application, such as FIX Log Analyzer, requires a constant attention to every detail of your design.
We have been following the list of the best practices for speeding up your website published by yahoo.

We have made sure that our apps run on every a-graded browsers and now we wonder: how do our apps perform on different browsers ?

We ran a simple test with 3000 execution reports (FIX Messages), copied and pasted from 1,084KB file, on a Windows XP 32 bit machine with 1 GB Ram on different browsers.

Below are the results:
  • 4 mins 20 secs I.E.8
  • 0 mins 40 secs. Chrome 4.1.249
  • 0 mins 48 secs. FireFox 3.5.9
  • 0 mins 56 secs. Opera 10.50
It looks like we should recommend any browser but IE for any serious user of our FIX Log Analyzer.

Thanks for reading this.
Marcello