Principles of Quantitative Development

6.4 ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE

In the introductory chapter, we described four different implementation and deployment options for a trading platform. The third option there was to develop them in-house while using as much of the existing infrastructure as practical. The architecture described above is a complete in-house trading platform of this kind. However, the scope of the project may be more ambitious and overarching, as in the fourth option discussed in the introduction. Indeed, we have a wide spectrum of choices between these two implementation options, depending on the vision and resources of the bank.

In this section, we will take the design one step further with some of the ideas we discussed in the preceding chapters. Because this book does not aim to recommend any specific implementation strategy, we will present our scheme for this more complex and ambitious trading platform as a deliberately high-level picture of many database applications working in collaboration with each other. Any more details would risk giving the false appearance of a real architecture or implementation plan with recommendations that are beyond the author's intentions.

Figure 6.5 shows the architecture as a collection of database applications working in collaboration. It divides the software design into three tiers. The top-level presentation tier consists of various user interfaces. The middle logic tier is for the services and processes that implement the trading platform logic. The programs in ...