OpenFin, the New York and London based fast-growing financial technology provider, today announced that for the first time it is open-sourcing its market-leading HTML5 container technology for financial desktops. The development aims to promote further community collaboration as OpenFin is being used by over 20 of the world’s leading banks, buy-side firms and trading platforms. OpenFin also announced the formation of an industry advisory board, with member firms including Barclays, Citi, CME Group, ICAP, J.P. Morgan, REDI, RBS, Trading Technologies and Tullett Prebon, to guide the direction of both its open-source and enterprise offerings.
HTML5 is rapidly being adopted by the financial industry because it is both light-weight and is the only cross-platform language supported by all major technology vendors including Google, Microsoft and Apple. However, modern web browsers which are typically used to run HTML5, do not provide the capabilities needed by real-time trading applications. Based on Google Chromium, OpenFin’s container provides a controlled, high-performance HTML5 engine purpose-built for desktops at banks and buy-side firms.
The OpenFin container will be open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. An enterprise edition which includes production support, enterprise security and other enterprise features, will remain under a commercial license.
“OpenFin’s industry leading technology has been developed with extensive input from major industry players over the past 4 years,” said Chuck Doerr, OpenFin’s President and COO. “Open-sourcing enables others to enhance and extend the project and it provides our customers with additional assurance as they use OpenFin for deployment of their mission critical platforms.”
OpenFin’s CEO Mazy Dar added, “Our advisory board will play a critical role in guiding our architecture and product roadmap. We’re thrilled to have participation from both senior business and technology representatives and look forward to a close collaboration as we enter a new phase of growth.”
Earlier this year as part of a separate project, OpenFin open-sourced a high-performance HTML5 grid known as “Hypergrid”. The component enables visualization of huge and fast-changing data sets and is now being used in several industry trading applications.
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