Arcontech Launches CityVision dna Software

27/02/2008

Arcontech – a leading developer of real-time market data software and wholly owned subsidiary of KTS plc – today unveiled CityVision dna the latest addition to its multi-award-winning CityVision software suite.

The new component, short for CityVision dot net api, allows software engineers using Microsoft’s .net development environment to write applications to interoperate with Arcontech’s CityVision StarNet real-time market data platform, to send and retrieve data in real-time using multiple sources and destinations, taking advantage of the full multi-threading capabilities and power of today’s multi-core, multiple processor computers.

This advanced software is particularly important for developers of true real-time applications, such as algorithmic trading interfaces because it allows them, easily, to access, process and re-distribute data faster than before, meaning that opportunities for profit can be detected and acted on ahead of the competition. Other products and technologies can restrict applications to a single core or are unreliable under continuous heavy load conditions.

dna should be very attractive to hedge funds, arbitrage dealers and modellers with intense processing requirements, where speed of response is crucial. Also, less skilled developers with simpler requirements will appreciate the simplicity of the interfaces.

The software has been developed using advanced techniques with extensive automated unit testing [1] and continuous integration. Consequently it is extremely robust and can perform under extreme load conditions.

Andrew Miller, managing director of Arcontech and CEO of KTS said: “CityVision dna is easy to use allowing custom applications to be developed inexpensively and deployed more quickly. In the same way as genetic engineering strives for perfection, CityVision dna allows reengineering at the core of real-time systems to improve the performance and reliability, Naturally, it is compatible with all CityVision servers, so existing investment by our clients is protected and value can be added easily and rapidly.

“Its high performance is not only because DNA is thread safe[2], but also the internal code is highly multi-threaded, allowing DNA to take advantage of even the most advanced multi core servers. Scaling an application across multiple StarNet servers can provide even greater performance if required.”

The technical details and benefits of the CityVision dna system include:

* Two modes of operation supported across the entire range of objects, synchronous and asynchronous.
* Synchronous mode allows the majority of feed tasks to be written in one line of code.
* Asynchronous mode allows for dynamic real-time date reception.
* A clean concise interface, every object having the absolute minimum amount of properties, methods and events to be able to get the job done. The objects are extremely easy to code with.
* Common object structure, each object has the same structure as every other, so once the user learns to use one (which is easy) they are all the same to use.

1 A unit test exercises “a unit” of production code in isolation from the full system and checks that the results are as expected. The size of the unit may vary between a class and a package. The importance of unit testing has increased with the invention of ‘extreme programming’, a methodology introduced to reduce the cost of software development. In this approach, a developer should write unit tests even before writing the actual code.

2 A piece of code is thread-safe if it functions correctly during simultaneous execution by multiple threads. In particular, it must satisfy the need for multiple threads to access the same shared data, and the need for a shared piece of data to be accessed by only one thread at any given time. (Source Wikipedia).