A few thoughts on the FIX Protocol conference in London - march 2010

Yesterday, I was at the FIX protocol conference: http://fixprotocol.org/fplevents/emea_2010/
There must have been about 500 people there.
I come back with mixed feelings about the conference. I certainly attended a few interesting sessions but I also got stuck in some so-and-so presentations. I might write a few other posts about the conference but first I will indulge in saying what I did not like.

The session: The design aspects of the fix protocol – by H. Klein and M. Simpson

1] the session slides were going through in a very unexciting way about a few designated message types such as ExecutionReport, MassQuote, etc.  Even worse, a whole slide was dedicated to the fact that some fix tags had been deprecated since 4.3 and therefore we should not use them.

C’mon guys, it’s march 2010 do we really need this ?

2] M. Simpson talked about some benefits of FIX.5.0.  one of these being App. Versioning.
If I understood this correctly it’s a feature that would allow you to get some messages in one version (say FIX.4.2) and some other messages in another version (say FIX.4.4)  Surely that’s okay for me. It means that tools like our FIX Log Analyzer will become even more useful.  But seriously guys can anybody think of a good justification for such a feature. How ugly (and I am using a euphemism here) would it have to be the code that will handle this part.

Thanks for reading this and if you were at the conference too please share your thoughts with us.

Marcello.