In this case study InfoQ reviews the usage of Adobe AIR and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) in the NASDAQ Market Replay application. It is an exciting time for the software industry, as the NASDAQ Market Replay implementation demonstrates that a powerful data driven application can be brought to the market quickly and deployed within a limited budget. Much of this is due to the improvements in the platforms, with both the emergence of cloud computing and strong client side runtimes.
NASDAQ Market Replay provides a NASDAQ-validated replay and analysis of the activity in the stock market. The application is built using the Adobe Flex and AIR platform, and utilizes the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for persisting historical market data. The combination of S3 and AIR offers a powerful deployment model with little internal infrastructure required. The simple, yet robust, deployment is possible because the AIR runtime runs on the client machine. Amazon S3 removes the need for a traditional middle-tier server, as the data is accessed in from the Amazon "cloud".
The Market Replay application enables users to view the best bids and offers at any point in time, replay the market in simulated real-time, and zoom to view events at the millisecond level. Investors can validate best-execution and Reg NMS compliance. Brokers and traders can review events at the time when their trades occurred to determine whether there was a problem or a missed opportunity. Brokers can send clients a NASDAQ-validated replay of the moment a trade occurred to validate their performance.
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