JP Uses Eclipse/RCP, better than Swing and .NET for the trading desktop?
An interesting revelation (to anyone not working or following the internal development habbits over at JP Morgan) is that the bank is using Eclipse and the RCP (Rich Client Platform) technology to build their market data, pricing and research workstation terminals.
JPMorgan developers selected Eclipse largely for its RCP (Rich Client Platform) technology, which enabled the international financial powerhouse to build an internal development system known as OneBench.
OneBench is a deployment platform for RCP-based applications, said Bruce Skingle, a London-based distinguished engineer with JPMorgan’s Investment Bank Technology group.
Basically, OneBench is an alternative to a user desktop for deploying the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) to run business applications. In essence, OneBench is a user’s workbench, whereas Eclipse is a programmer’s workbench, Skingle said.
This is quite interesting, but even more interesting is that their choice came down to Eclipse and Java’s SWING:
Skingle said JPMorgan looked at several technologies as the basis for OneBench. Eventually, the company narrowed the decision down to the Java Swing GUI components platform and Eclipse’s RCP. Skingle said RCP won out because of its inherent plug-in nature. Now the RCP-based OneBench is viewed as the platform of choice for desktop application developers at JPMorgan.
This is worth paying attention to since any time it comes down to real-time UIs for finance, its often a tradeoff of performance and flexibility.
Yet, RCP stood out in graphical performance, Skingle said. Indeed, a proof of concept based on the Snapper UI showed that an SWT table could easily handle a 400,000-row data set with 1,000 updates per second.
Well I will reserve judgement for now since I have not had any first hand exposure to Eclipse or RCP as of late. That said I am interested in knowing how they performed their test. Was it just one grid? When it comes to UI performance I maintain that nothing should be as capable or performant as .NET’s Windows Forms because it provides the most tightly knit wrapper of the Win32 display system. How would RCP perform with say half a dozen Level II quote windows on the screen, in addition to an order blotter, real-time charting and all of the other typical 3rd party trading apps that run on desks today?
Hmmmm…
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