Bloomberg Open Sources Its Market Data Distribution Technology 25
First time accepted submitter Cara_Latham writes "Hoping to spur innovation and collaboration, Bloomberg LP is opening its market data interfaces to anyone, without cost or restriction. The market data provider's application programming interface (API), known as BLPAPI (Bloomberg LP API), is already used by Bloomberg, its clients and other technology providers to build connections between financial firms' applications and Bloomberg's market data and applications. Today any technology professional, or even students at a university, can access BLPAPI to quickly build connections to market data feeds. The BLPAPI interface works with a number of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl."
Philanthropy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Philanthropy (Score:5, Informative)
The *API* is free, not the data feeds, which means you can create third-party applications without a terminal, but will need one (or one of their appliances) to test it and use their data. So, unless you are willing to open your wallet and grab a few thousand a month, it's probably not that useful for someone that doesn't have a contract with them.
Re:Philanthropy (Score:4, Informative)
I've actually contacted Bloomberg to ask about this, and they're not even open-sourcing anything. They're announcing their intention to form a committee to create open standards based on their tech. This is great because it will help fill gaps that AMQP and others are trying to fill, but I'm not sure it deserves an announcement until, you know, there's actually something to look at.
Re:Philanthropy (Score:4, Informative)
It is not that useful PERIOD...
The Bloomberg API is not that great. It is like writing code to match a DDE interface. I have written code against the Bloomberg API and while it sounds nice that Bloomberg is open sourcing it, it is useless.
I can understand why Bloomberg created the API that they did. The problem has to do with being flexible and not knowing what the underlying data is. Remember Bloomberg grabs data about equities, bonds, commodities, etc. And they all have their data idiosyncracises.
I think the real problem with Bloomberg is that they are being shutout of the market. I last used them a year ago and frankly they were not much better than twitter. The advantage with Twitter is that it is free, whereas Bloomberg costs about 1900 USD per month. The only place where Bloomberg still has an advantage is its data warehouse. I have yet to find a data warehouse that is as extensive as theirs...
Re: (Score:2)
I think the real problem with Bloomberg is that they are being shutout of the market. I last used them a year ago and frankly they were not much better than twitter. The advantage with Twitter is that it is free, whereas Bloomberg costs about 1900 USD per month. The only place where Bloomberg still has an advantage is its data warehouse. I have yet to find a data warehouse that is as extensive as theirs...
The advantage with Bloomberg is that it actually has data, whereas Twitter is filled with random people's mumblings?
Other than getting real time feeds of news (which twitter could be good for I suppose), bloomberg is really mostly used for data. Twitter has nothing. Bloomberg has real time and historical data on equities, bonds, corporate actions, ratings actions, analyst ratings, etc.--all available instantly with the touch of a couple of buttons on their goofy colored keyboard. Access to this data fe
Data feeds are not free (Score:1)
big deal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Most of the reviews of bloomberg on theglassdoor.com are too positive.
The summary is
1)No real design
2)Just fix bugs all day, as fast as you can
3)Crappy priority OS and dev env Bloomberg Terminal
Have a co-worker that had to interface with there API , along with other financial companies . In his experience Bloomberg was broken the most and always buggy, see comment 2.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course.
The whole point is to get people to write apps and programs against the API. Then a bunch of programs will be "supports Bloomberg!" as a feature item. This means people will then pay Bloomberg for access to t
Good for Entrepreneurs (Score:2)
The API design is crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Had a quick review of the API, for high-freq use cases the design is crap. For historical data use-cases, the design crap.
To add to that, if there is no access to data, even limited access (no real-time or complete historical views), then what is all this fuss about? and furthermore, what is open source about providing APIs? they were already doing it for free if you had an account and asked for it, if thats the case for calling something open source, then by that measure MS as open sourced its entire .NET platform from day one. lots of astro-turfing and shills on slashdot these days.
I sometimes wonder if the people that design the BB and RFA interfaces are not people but rather monkeys randomly pounding a keyboard....
Re: (Score:2)
With .NET Reflection, you essentially have the entire source code available already.
A better analogy, I think, is the whole Windows platform. While there were questions about hidden APIs, it was largely well documented a long time ago on MSDN, in Petzold before that, and if you had any sort of compiler it almost certainly had either a help file (win32.hlp being the most popular) or other resource.
If API = open source, Windows is as well.
Release their BLP C++ libraries! Not this junk. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bloomberg has a HUGE set of libraries for C++ that are similar to C++98 and C++0x/C++11 stl, but don't necessarily rely on all the advanced compiler features of C++0x/C++11. If they'd release those libraries, then this would be news. It wouldn't put them at a disadvantage in their market, but it would help gain some respect from the C++ community.
Open API's vs. Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Open API's are not the same as open source. An Open API allows anyone to create a client to use their stuff, which would be to their advantage. It also allows implicitly allows anyone to try to duplicate the back end system, but that is a heck of a lot of work for which they aren't providing source code for.
This reminds me of the time back in the '90s when Microsoft "opened" (this was before the term Open Source) the COM/DCOM/ActiveX specifications by turning them over to ECMA (a computer manufacturer's trade group) for "standardization". Then they paid Software AG to port the COM support stack to Unix, which didn't work very well because (for one thing) there were numerous dependencies on Windows data structures such as hWnd and hDC. Except for a few gullible journalists in the trade press, the world basically ignored "cross-platform DCOM", and soon it went away.
Bad title, please correct. (Score:2)
Opening an API that was already open to pretty much anyone who asked != opensource. The correct title of the article would be: Bloomberg opens part of market data API to non-clients and tries to pass it off as open source. There is no new source to be gotten and recompiled here.
Not well-built (Score:2)
Wrong Title (Score:1)
Interested in developing finance apps? Try this... (Score:3)