Re: [Finance-quote-devel] non-http quote sources?

[Paul F. <pj...@in...>]

G'day Linas and F::Q people,

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 06:05:43PM -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:

> I was talking to someone the other day about non-http-based quote
> sources, such as bloomberg, reuters.   How well is this project
> set up/modularized to be able to deal with these other sources?

The short answer is that if somebody can write a function that returns
an appropriate hash (or hashref), and is willing to bundle it into
a module and add a couple of helper functions to describe what sort of
data gets returned, then we can plug that straight into Finance::Quote
with no changes to the existing code required.

	use Finance::Quote;
	my $quoter =3D Finance::Quote->new("Reuters");

will load and register the Finance::Quote::Reuters module if it exists.
What happens inside that module is up to the module writer.

I'm not familiar with how Bloomberg or Reuters supply their information.
If you could enlighten me a little, then I can probably come to a
more useful assessment of the situation.

> More generically, there's this idea that maybe we should expand=20
> function to get historical data as well.  For example: we were thinking:
> get data from flat-file, if not there, then get it from sql database, if
> not there, then get it from yahoo, etc.  -- or get it from all three,
> merging what data is available.   Certainly, this project wasn't
> *originally* defined to do this, but should we expand our scope?
> Is this a good idea? if we do expand, then I expect a fair amount of
> restructuring might be needed ...  what should the interfaces
> be?

FWIW, there's Finance::QuoteHist (available via CPAN) that is able fetch
historical quotes off the web.

As for our project, I guess I have mixed opinions.  At the moment
Finance::Quote doesn't touch the disk, doesn't require a database, and
has a nice clean interface (especially with the development version).
I'm hesitant to change that.  On the other hand, I'm very happy to
support modules that sit on top/underneath F::Q and provide historical
quote capabilities (or caching capabilities).

I'd appreciate more ideas and discussion on this subject.  I can certainly
see it being useful.

Cheers,

	Paul

--=20
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