15 June 2011
The OpenGamma team is pleased to announce the 0.8.0 release of our flagship technology stack, the OpenGamma Platform.
Much like 0.7.0 and 0.7.1, we consider this a beta-quality release. We think that you should feel confident in rolling the functionality into production, but we still don't have all the end-user functionality that we think is necessary for a 1.0.
That being said, I want to highlight two massive changes in the end-user experience in 0.8.0.
New Web GUI
The 0.7.x release stream had two GUI options:
- What we affectionately call the "green screens" (the RESTful endpoints located at
/jaxon your web console), which acted as the default GUI when you hit a View Processor instance; and - The early stages of our new Web GUI, which wasn't enabled by default.
We've changed that around, and now our new Web GUI is the default front-end to your View Processor instance(s).
This is still early stage for the Web GUI, but what we're trying to do is take the best user principles from modern consumer internet applications and apply them to finance, rather than coming out with something that looks like the status quo in finance. We're proud of what we've done thus far, and we've really just started.
Our goal is to put the best user experience in the industry on top of the best technology in the industry.
Explain Value
Our dependency graph approach to calculations was designed to have a number of benefits:
- It gives us inherent parallelism that we can exploit (and man, our 48-core Opteron test server here screams running large Views);
- It allows end users to declare the values they want to see without having to figure out all the interim calculation requirements;
- It allows drill-down into execution plans and calculations to see the calculation as it's computed.
In 0.7.x, only the first and second benefits were actually available. Today, the third is as well.
In our new Analytics viewer in the new Web GUI, you can actually drill down into any given value to see the dependency graph structure leading to that value, as well as all the interim calculations.
And it works exactly as you'd expect. See a yield curve? You can drill down into it the same way you can for a result value. Live ticking calculations? Your dependency graph viewers tick as well. Pause your calculation and then want to introspect a value? That works as well, even when you have remote calculation nodes hanging off your View Processor.
We're pretty proud of this, and we think it'll help developers understand how the engine is working, as well as stopping end users from asking developers on a regular basis why particular values are showing up the way they are.
But Wait, There's More
As usual, this release has a number of bug fixes, enhancements to our Excel Integration Module, performance improvements, and new asset classes.
There's no reason you shouldn't dive in right away, but we'll be following up with a 0.8.1 shortly with sample data so you can be up and running with live streaming risk in a matter of minutes after your download.