Financial data can now be sent in real-time over the
internet with as much ease as audio and video thanks to
the availability of a new protocol developed by UK-based
company Caplin. This new capability is of especial
interest to stock exchanges, merchant banks and similar
information providers who want to publish data directly
to end-users over the web.
Traditionally web pages use the HTTP protocol, which
is a ‘client pull’ technology. To display a page, the
web browser has to request data from a web server. Once
the web server delivers the data, the transaction is
complete. If the original page information on the server
subsequently changes, the user does not find out until
he requests the page again.
However, for live market data, you need to have a
system that keeps track of the data that each user is
looking at and ‘pushes’ any changes to the user
automatically. In addition, before such a system can be
of practical use in real-time financial applications, it
has to satisfy a number of other criteria. It has to
accommodate all types of market data and provide rapid
delivery almost all the time (warning the user
immediately there is a delay). It has to be compatible
with existing browsers, work perfectly with all parts of
the internet and be available in a form that allowed it
to be adapted to information vendors and software
developers. Caplin says that RTTP (Real-Time Text
Protocol) is the first protocol that fulfils all these
criteria.
RTTP is claimed to be equally suited to
point-to-point communication over a Local Area Network
and to broadcasting data to thousands of simultaneous
users over the internet. It has been in trials in
financial institutions in Britain and the United States
and has been used for the transmission of
mission-critical data since 1997.
