disclaimer: Morgan Stanley was invited to the event by OpenFin.
This year I have had the pleasure to represent Morgan Stanley on the finJS.IO NYC conference in midtown. We had an awesome crowd, many friends and former colleges showing up – who could resist such a line up of presenters?
We had OpenFin's own Mazy Dar providing the opening words and giving a heads up on the sessions: Graham Odds from Scott Logic, Fergus Keenan from Adaptive, Terry Thorsen from ChartIQ, Jason Dennis from FactSet, John David Dalton from Microsoft and Mazy himself to present and amuse us.
FactSet
First we have had FactSet taking the stage, speaking about unbundling, interoperability and data concordance. He showed us what FactSet is and what they do provide – with 14 datacenters, 650 3rd party data sets, 25 of their own content sets, with over 300 exchanges, over 130 news sources, etc the amount of data they have on their fingertips are astonishing. They built their application stack on four pillars – workflows, apps/components, content and technology, with the following bingo board in technology (that being the most relevant for us): HTML5, Node, websockets, angular, vue, http/2, elastic, hadoop, spark, C++, C#, Java, Python, Go, memcached, vmware, nsx, linux, windows, hpc, cdn. Their focus is at 3 steps – survey, pick, implement. Resulting in process on how to normalize content, how to implement workflow. We have to admit – concordance and interoperability is hard. They are excelling in the former – spent 30 years building concordance model on securities, they do understand directives and object symbology needed, etc. They are (next to Morgan Stanley) part of the Financial Desktop Connectivity and Collaboration Consortium (FDC3) to enable financial participants to build solutions that link components and data. When it comes to interoperability on the desktop, they depend on OpenFin and Symphony for local and global messaging bus, and leveraging the power of fins:// for live collaboration in contexts.
Next they talked about how they moved from their WPF only UI to the web and hosting the website built using Angular later React in the WPF container; than stepping another step and moving their application out of the host container and running as a native web app. However seeing the limitations of such approach, they turned backwards again and started using a thick container to host their application, so to enable some of the otherwise unexploited desktop features to their application – like this enabled them proper out of band notifications out of their machine learning platform.
Adaptive
Next presenter was from Adaptive, who spoke about mostly the evolution of trading in the world, starting from 300 BC up till today, touching the 17th, 18th century in the meanwhile. He did speak about where the IT budget of the financial companies are going – from the $127bn annual budget, in 2017 we have had $2.5bn on advanced analytics with a +15% growth, on artificial intelligence $1.5bn with a +14% growth, on robotic process automation $0.5bn with a +10% growth and on cloud computing a $1bn with a +19% growth – all significant numbers and the he made us think about the implications as well.
ChartIQ
Next came ChartIQ which spoke about their finsemble application platform, showing frameless browser windows, and showing the analogy we have: windows are the nodes, the communication bus is the network and the microservices are the services when it comes to compare it to distributed systems. Applications are and "ensemble" effort, components that are visible and services that are hidden. What they came up with is a solution based on openfin and their custom architecture. When it comes to synchronizing state, the fact that components can start in various orders needs to be supported by a pub/sub mechanism. When it comes to performance, you have to invest into Chromium's process splintering to avoid unnecessary overhard from Chromium instances; and you have to introduce dependency ordering to avoid startup race condition errors. When it comes to debugging, you need to introduce central mgmt and logging, when it comes to user experience you cannot just have a loose interface (you need to introduce window management like snapping, docking, etc). Lastly, when it comes to aesthetics, and having a heterogeneous set of component interfaces, there isn't a better solution than having a hard word and introducing something along the lines of 'Font Finance' similar to 'Font Awesome', a set of web components that is mandated to be used.
And than there is the tough tail to be fixed – monitor plug/unplug/resolution change, orientation changes, event storms & throttling, working around issues on max server connections to enable features like webpack hot reload, to support hotkeys, to support CORS, to enable proper timer sync (needed for central logging as well!), to support fitting to the DOM when it comes to dynamic height content, to avoid missing mouseout events at the window edges, etc, etc., the list is nearly endless.
OpenFin
Next presenting was Mazy Dar from OpenFin, who talked about the 'bank of the future' and what banks can learn from DropBox. We did see the achievements and development of mobile applications for banks in the last decade, but where is the similar change for the desktop apps? We should get out of band notifications, offline synced information, etc like we had in the '90s, but with today's technology stack and with integration into the builtin desktop services.
Scott Logic
Following was Scott Logic who talked about how to create reactive desktop applications through an example that involved someone doing a two in a refrigerator and immediately regretting this decision But the presentation was serious, and talked about what we can achieve when trying to do more than just switching between a 'desktop' and a 'mobile' web mode, and did involve some very eye catchy demos of interaction models that adapted themselves based on not just screen size, but rather smaller differences like "how is my container being aligned on the screen". The magic behind is moving a level further than reactive media queries, and – you can do that today, of course with a polyfill ( https://github.com/ausi/cq-prolyfill ) for container queries ( Container Queries ).
Microsoft
The last session was from Microsoft, which was focusing on ecmascript modules ( https://nodejs.org/api/esm.html ) , and the current issues with them – whether it comes to debugging, error reporting, builtin variables, babel, etc all do suffer if you try –experimental-modules today. What was shown by the John wearing a BladeRunnerJS tshirt how https://www.npmjs.com/package/@std/esm is solving all the problems in Node 4+, by not only providing support for mixing common js and mjs, but also to be available in the node REPL (see https://medium.com/web-on-the-edge/es-modules-in-node-today-32cff914e4b for much more details):
$ node
> require("@std/esm")
@std/esm enabled
> import p from "path"
undefined
> p.join("hello", "world")
'hello/world'
It also enabled to unlock features like dynamic import, live bindings (yes, actual live bindings cross module boundaries), file uri scheme, etc. It also have unambiguous module support, named exports, top level main await, gzipped modules, etc. You could ask what is the performance hit you have to pay? Loading CJS ~0.28 ms/m, built-in ESM ~0.51 ms/m, first @std/esm with no warm cache ~1.56 ms/m, but with warm caches @std/esm cached runs were ~0.54 ms/m. Which means it is nearly the built in performance but with a lot more flexibility, better error reporting, path protocol resolution, environment variables, etc.
To summarize, the whole event with the mingling at the beginning and at the end, also the various presentations were just fantastic