Today StreamBase hosted an online roundtable entitled “How to Empower Your Development Team with CEP and Visual Programming” featuring developers from J.P. Morgan, GAIN Capital, and Datasports. Combined, the panelists have 35+ years of development experience, and years of CEP experience, and they were kind enough to share those experiences with us, discussing the adoption of CEP technology, developing applications with CEP, and the best practices they’ve learned along the way.
For developers, development managers, architects, and business stakeholders this roundtable tells an interesting story about how CEP technology can truly transform the role of the developer. Take a look at some of the highlights below, watch the replay, then comment below and tell us about your experiences with CEP.
Talk about your experience with CEP
Phil Martin, Datasports: I like using StreamBase because I like tools that let the computers do stuff that the computers are good at, and let me do stuff that requires thought. As a developer, you wind up doing some tasks over and over again; the structure of the application, domain specific plumbing, etc. Everytime feels like wasted effort. StreamBase lets me focus on the stuff that requires thought, not the details of implementation, connectivity, processing events, and so on. Another comment is around the aggregate operator. It is analogous to another API to learn. It’s an incredibly rich and flexible operator that I think almost qualifies as its own sub language or sub paradigm. There’s a lot there and a lot of subtlety in its behavior, learn about and study it!
Mike Grandilone, J.P. Morgan Asset Management: The shift to a message passing structure is sometimes a shift in thinking. It's key to understanding how StreamBase handles the life of a tuple; we gained that through experience.
Talk about the applications you've built with StreamBase
Joseph Chua, GAIN Capital: After 4 days of training and going through the examples, I built my first StreamBase application in just three hours, and it was fully deployed in a week. It connects to market data, manipulates the data, and stores it in a high-speed database. We've also built market making and real-time surveillence applications, and many more to come.
Phil: I've built several applications with StreamBase. One is an "indication of interest" (IOI) app that monitors trading interest and compares it against a CRM system and sends alerts to individual sales traders because they have a customer who either has traded on the symbol, transacted above a given threshold, or has a real-time order for it. The correlation of these factors in real-time also includes real-time news sources. Also, I've worked on two algorithmic trading systems that host their strategies in StreamBase and perform real-time risk checks on the algos, and an ETF arbitrage system where there was only one strategy, but it was a very involved strategy.
Mike: We brought a smart order routing system up and running in 6 months with 2 developers, which we thought was very fast. We also got the business people involved in the canvas and the development - this is a very important factor in getting applications done quickly.
Talk about the benefits of StreamBase and visual programming
Phil: StreamBase helps facilitate communication. Whenever you want to convey information about a system, you always draw a picture. And they almost always look like StreamBase Event Flow. If you have taken the necessary care to clearly delineate modules, then, depending on the technical sophistication of who you are talking to, you can choose how far to drill down. It's extremely helpful in faciliating technical discourse; with the business users, it saves time.
Mike: Visual development has really improved the speed of our development. Especially when you're doing a proof of concept. It helps you understand the application's logic, and also communicate with the business; in typical programming environments like Java, you're not going to show many people the code, but you can do it with StreamBase.
Joseph: The big value is that all the technical details are abstracted away in terms of connectivity and low-level code; we can then communicate with the business owners, so development cycles are shorter and more efficient. The other value we have found is they we can very quickly build a prototype solution so the business can make decisions more quickly with respect to requirements and decisions to develop the applications.
Phil: One thing that's helpful: with StreamBase, you can tell at a glance that spaghetti code is spaghetti code. You can tell if an application was thoughtfully designed without hours and hours and hours of code review.
What best practices have you learned from your experiences with CEP?
Mike: You need to shift your thinking, to think in terms of events, rather than traditional static applications. And, just like any application, build a testing environment at the same time as your application logic.
Joseph: Identify the connection points quickly, be open minded and willing to unlearn the more traditional ways of development, use StreamBase interfaces, and make sure you continuously refactor the application.
Phil: There are lot of resources for ramping up StreamBase skills - invest the effort to develop your skills. The speed of putting together something quickly is a great asset. The thing to keep in mind is that although the development speed of StreamBase is a benefit in the short term, it can, if you're not careful, work against you in the long term.
Phil: While the principles aren't different, the practice IS different. The first thing that sold me is seeing the ease with which you can change and tune your threading model, take things in and out of the threading part of your system, with multiplicity and dispatch methods. Scalability and performance is about taking more advantage of the cores in a system, and careful management of it becomes more and more important.
What was your experience integrating other code into CEP?
Mike: We have separate routing logic written in Java for routing logic that we integrated with our StreamBase application. We've done a lot of work with custom Java operators in StreamBase - it's very straight forward - no problem in doing it. There's lots of power in developing in Java for code that isn't event driven that allowed us to bring in the power of algorithmic trading as a drop-in to the StreamBase environment. Also, we have a C# front end GUI, which uses the .NET interface from StreamBase - this was easy, although the challenge was how to take a GUI that isn't event-based and make it work with an event-driven application. We're in production with that now.
The StreamBase community
Phil: I've put two components onto the StreamBase Component Exchange - mostly adapters. The publishing process was straightforward. One is an adapter that watches for events on the file system and creates StreamBase events when files are created, renamed, modified, or deleted, and another one listens for calls on a web service interface and creates events for the applciation. I suggest other developers look at the utility classes – see what are other developers are doing, and pick up some tips and techniques and helpful hands-on examples of how they are building their applications.
StreamBase Resources for Developers
Below are the StreamBase resources mentioned in this roundtable:
- Trial version of StreamBase: www.streambase.com/download
- Product documentation: docs.streambase.com
- Personalized demonstrations: www.streambase.com/forms/request-a-demonstration
- “How To” developer webinars: www.streambase.com/webinars
- StreamBase Component Exchange: www.streambase.com/sbx
- StreamBase University: www.streambase.com/sbu
- StreamBase Training and Certification: www.streambase.com/community/training-and-certification
- Datasports blog for StreamBase CEP developers: http://datasports.ca
