This article explores the challenges in developing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Financial Information eXchange (FIX) data, complete with code examples.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. This article explores the challenges in developing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Financial Information eXchange (FIX) data. FIX is both a protocol and a message format, but to create a FIX GUI we will focus just on the message format. A FIX message is a standard message format for transmitting financial and investment banking data. Below is an example of a FIX message: Note: The| character is sent as \1 It could be said that the FIX format balances the compactness of data with its readability, but I feel that FIX messages are neither particularly compact nor human readable. So our first challenge was to come up with a design to present FIX data clearly and intuitively. Taking inspiration from targetcompid.com we realized that before we create a commercial FIX GUI, we could first offer a free-to-use FIX Parser, which can display any FIX message in a human-readable form. Let’s start with the FIX Parser: The user can paste in a FIX message, click parse, and it will be translated below. With the shift to the cloud, and the ability to display rich web-based functionality, we decided to render our UI in the browser rather than creating a local runnable executable. We selected React for our front-end technology and Java for the back end; for the FIX parsing, we used an existing FIX engine. FIX engines are FIX protocol translators for business messages used by the financial and investment banking industry.
