About FF.FIX Engine

FF.FIX Engine is a next generation customizable, high-performance, low latency and a feature rich FIX Engine including a rich set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to develop a FIX based trading application and employing Direct Market Access (DMA).

The real challenges for financial institutions, brokers and Buy and Sell-side firms trading across all asset classes are to achieve higher levels of Straight Through Processing, attain seamless global connectivity and implement efficient business analysis and reporting tools. Meeting these challenges takes considerable costs, energy and time, both for big and small organizations. Since high costs and non-flexibility of readymade tools and solutions are the major hurdles in meeting the market challenges; parties often prefer to develop their own customized FIX solutions. FF.FIX Engine caters to the needs of such parties.

FF.FIX Engine is an affordable, scalable, multithreaded and robust platform on which FIX aspirants can build their own customized FIX solutions. The object oriented APIs of FF.FIX Engine are dependable and well-tested with major exchanges and brokers. They seamlessly integrate the FIX solution with any Order Management System application and provide global connectivity with FIX compliant counterparties.

For whom?

FF.FIX Engine is intended to serve a wide spectrum of:

• Buy and Sell-side firms, brokers and financial institutions willing to develop their own customized FIX solutions, components and plug-ins.
• Software vendors willing to integrate FIX with their applications.

Why FF.FIX Engine?

FF.FIX Engine is designed with an emphasis on:

• Quick development and fast deployment for connectivity with new counterparties.
• Easy and dynamic customization for maintaining and expanding the market reach.
• Freedom from buying costly, non-flexible and comprehensive off-the-shelf FIX solutions, when a client actually needs only some specific components or plug-ins.
• Saving huge costs and time required for programming and testing of FIX session level intricacies and enabling developers to concentrate on their organization's core business logic.
• Providing an insight into the possible complexities of FIX solutions using open source sample codes and substantially reducing the FIX Solution conceptualization and development period.
• High flexibility and customizability in implementing the FIX Protocol and FIX dialects.
• Enabling customized analysis and reporting of the real-time and historical business data through customizable plug-ins.

FF.FIX Engine architecture

FF.FIX Engine has a flexible modular architecture based on Microsoft^® .NET Framework 2.0 with scalability for growing business needs. Its multithreaded implementation makes it robust, fast and dependable.

FF.FIX Engine features

• Uses Windows^® XP, Windows^® Server 2003 and later editions as the platform and harness their multitasking and multiprocessing benefits.
• Leverages the Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® features like platform independence, interoperability, CLI, IntelliSense^® and integrated build and deployment for easy development and high degree of programming productivity.
• Provides a complete support for the FIX session level logic and enables FIX developers to focus on their organization's core business requirements.
• Supports session Initiator, session Acceptor and hybrid applications.
• Allows easy and powerful customization of session level logic through configuration files (XML format) without affecting the code.
• Includes an easy-to-use graphical tool FF.FIX Analyzer for analyzing real-time and historical messages, monitoring message processing backlog and message latencies, generating custom reports, tracking orders and validating messages against specific requirements.
• Supports FIX dialects (non-standard implementations of FIX, like custom messages/fields/field enumerations).
• Includes an easy-to-use graphical tool FF.FIX ROE for the quick implementation of different FIX Protocol versions and dialects.
• Includes open source sample codes for session Initiator and Acceptor applications, benchmarking and stress testing applications for session Initiators and Acceptors, custom trade report plug-ins etc. FIX developers get a good insight into interrelations among different modules from these samples and may build their application on similar patterns to save their time and efforts.
• Provides the message compliance support, like 'restrict an order with a quantity <20' for specific business needs.
• Allows IP filtering to restrict the access of session Initiators (Buy-sides) to the session Acceptor (Sell-side) application at the TCP/IP level.
• Provides message throttling capabilities to limit the message-receiving rate during a FIX session and control the load on an Initiator/Acceptor application without affecting other sessions.
• Allows timeout setting for important session events like LogonTimeout, ConnectionTimeout etc, as a part of session logic implementation.
• Allows customizable GapFill mechanisms through configuration files in XML format.
• Allows to link message sequence number resetting with important session events like Logon, Logout etc.
• Allows message latency monitoring and raises appropriate alerts.
• Monitors message processing backlog at the counterparty side.
• Supports database and file based persistence mechanisms.
• Supports FIX Protocol versions FIX 4.0-4.4, 5.0, 5.0 SP1.
• Supports SSL as well as FIX encryption methods for secure message exchange.
• Supports FIX message encoding.
• Supports customizable message validation levels for inbound as well as outbound messages.
• Allows masking of important fields in messages (like passwords).
• Provides important event-based alerts (like inbound message, outbound message, session state change, sequence number change, error, warning, info etc.)
• Allows customizable logging of events (logging of specific types of events in the session log/system log).
• Puts no limits on creation of FIX sessions. A FIX session represents the connection between host application and counterparty using the FIX Protocol. This limit is of course depends on the number of sessions permitted in the software license agreement.)
• Supports automatic resetting of message sequence numbers in a FIX session, based on daily or weekly schedules, as per the exchange specifications.

FF.FIX Engine Knowledgebase

FF.FIX Engine Knowledgebase aims to help FIX developers and FIX aspirants by providing a step-by-step orientation to the implementation of the FIX Protocol and substantially reducing their FIX solution conceptualization period. It contains elaborate information on implementing different modules of a FIX solution, interactions among them and several FAQs with code examples.

FF.FIX Engine trial

A 30-day evaluation version of the complete FF.FIX Engine is available at Downloads. An extended evaluation is also available upon request.

To know more about the integration path of FF.FIX Engine with your trading application, do contact us with your requirements.