Caplin Systems Ltd, web trading technology specialist and the market leader in single-dealer platforms, today launched BladeRunner, a new HTML5 development environment, together with a suite of tools and components designed to help banks build advanced trading applications in HTML5.
Large financial institutions have recently rushed to adopt the new HTML5 web standard. But while committed to the use of HTML5 for future projects, they are hampered by the lack of a suitable framework for developing highly complex trading applications using this technology. In response, Caplin has created a powerful new set of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript libraries that provide core web trading functionality, together with tools to accelerate and de-risk large scale development projects. These tools allow programmers to develop and test individual re-usable business modules, called ‘blades,’ and then combine them into applications for desktop and mobile devices.
All Caplin’s HTML5 tools and components are based on open standards. They are available separately, can be used individually or in combination, and are designed to work well with existing HTML5 libraries.
Paul Caplin, founder and CEO of Caplin Systems, says, “Almost all the banks we speak to see web trading applications as a key differentiator, and recognise that the future for online trading lies with HTML5. What we have now created with BladeRunner is a range of HTML5 financial trading libraries and a development toolset that allows bank developers to reach the same levels of productivity that they achieve in more traditional languages.”
As one of the leading proponents of web technologies, Caplin recognized that large-scale projects in
HTML5 require more advanced tools than those available in standard libraries. BladeRunner
addresses major issues such as class loading and dependency management, MVC (Model-View-Controller) type patterns to enforce separation of concerns, namespacing and code privacy, integrated unit and acceptance testing, and efficient bundling and deployment of the final application.
The new Caplin offerings use an open, lightweight, unobtrusive model, and are designed to work with banks’ existing tools and components. Caplin customers already using beta versions of the new technology to accelerate their development projects are reporting strong results.
Paul Caplin continues, “We created these new tools as a result of our own experience of building large-scale web trading apps. We have found that with BladeRunner we can halve the time and effort it takes to build a typical implementation. And after the initial build, we can re-use, extend and maintain the applications much more effectively. The big investment banks are already showing a keen appetite for this, because of the huge productivity gains that can be achieved.”
