Re: [Quickfix-developers] FAST FIX

[Graham M. <gm...@ma...>]

On Jul 23, 2007, at 3:02 PM, Caleb Epstein wrote:

>
> I believe FAST is still a 'proof of concept' and is generally being
> used for very high volume, session-less traffic like market data
> feeds.  Are any ECNs using it for order entry?  Has anyone gone
> through the exercise of mapping (say) the FIX4.4 message
> specifications to FAST message templates?

I think that this is essentially correct (I'm going on what I recall
from the FIX Protocol ECN/Exchanges working group meeting last month).
 Given that several of these exchanges are seeing over 2x bandwidth
wins using FAST versus their proprietary market data wire protocols,
several are moving into production with FAST implementations for
delivering market data.  None of them mentioned using FAST for order
entry yet.

Also, one word on message template design.  From what I gather this is
at least as important to a good FAST implementation as the quality and
speed of the underlying codec code.

>
> Frankly, if there is no real "session" involved and you're just
> consuming market data, I don't know that QuickFIX would be a
> particularly good choice of APIs even if it did have FAST support.
> You're probably better off with (say) the proof-of-concept FAST C
> library  available from fixprotocol.org/fast.

Actually, there is still a FIX session that gets communicated over the
FAST connection, and there is a separate spec for managing session at
the FAST layer (handling corruption in the FAST stream for example):
http://www.fixprotocol.org/fastspec

Also, I believe the code that is up on fixprotocol.org is a sample
implementation of FAST v1.0. The current version is v1.1 and version
1.0 of the standard has been all but withdrawn because of some fairly
large shortcomings.  So that code is of limited use.

That all being said, Oren, we'd love to hear more about your FAST
implementation plans, and help out as much as we can.

graham

Also: sorry, but a shameless plug for a blog post on that meeting that
I did a few weeks ago:

http://blog.marketcetera.com/2007/06/22/fast-is-fast-and-standard/


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