I have been looking for a fast messaging system for our internal as a transport on which to route trade order and FIX Protocol encoded with FAST , and potentially for a client to handle market data for electronic trading.

While there are a lot of offerings out there, most are orientated to support Java, and I need C++ and to an extent C#, the new offerings that support AMQP are very interesting.

Here is the list I looked at:

Name & Vendor	Type	Primary Platform	Comments
Wombat http://www.wombatfs.com/	Full market data distribution system		Wombat has all the components needed to set up your own feed handlers and ticker plant.
Caplin http://www.caplin.com/marketdataplatform.htm	Full market data distribution system		Similar to Wombat, Caplin is a full featured system - my impressions last time I spoke with them was that it was very good but expensive.
Infodyne http://www.infodyne.com/	Full market data distribution system
RTI http://www.rti.com/	High Performance message system	C++	RTI offers really high performance message routing
29West LDM http://www.29west.com/	High Performance Messaging System		Very High performance messaging - wombat uses this as a transport
Lightstreamer http://www.lightstreamer.com/	Excellent web push technology using AJAX, Commercial and community version	Web Applications, though there is thick client support	I really like this product and would definitely use it on web projects.
Mantaray http://www.mantamq.com/	Open & Commercial Message distribution system	JMS/Java but has C++ and .net support.	Difficult to assess the status of Coridan since the web page is blank and the support forums are very quiet.
RabbitMQ http://www.rabbitmq.com/	Open high volume resilient messaging system.	Java	Very interesting product supports high message volumes and AMQP protocol; we are interested to try the forthcoming C++ access.
ActiveMQ http://activemq.apache.org/	Open source message queue system	cross platform	Great product, for general purpose messaging, we will probably support this as a transport in our internal systems.
Qpid http://cwiki.apache.org/qpid/	Qpid provides multiple language implementations of the Advanced Messaged Queuing Protocol (AMQP)	Java, but C++ brokers and clients exist	This is promising as an opensource offering, I think that it needs a few more iterations before the C++ parts are ready for real use.
MSMQ		Windows	Supported in our routing products
JMS		Java

Delving into code

For those of us who now use C# working with C++ can bring back some painful memories of unresolved externals. Having spent some time tracking down why code would build in static mode rather than shared (MD) mode i discovered that one of their .libs was different under the 2 build models.

To check out what is going on:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin>lib /EXTRACT:.\DebugMD\EasyDBC
ommand.obj /OUT:test C:\root\marex\DebugMD\xputils.lib

the /OUT command extracts the required module.

Then to see whats in the object extracted use:


C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin>dumpbin /SYMBOLS test > zuc.txt

You can then dig through zuc.txt to find the missing/offending external reference - in my case the number of parameters on a call had changed.

FAST Protocol

The alpha version of FASTTemplateGen is now on the web http://www.fintechworld.com/fixtools/FixRepo.htm