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."
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....