What's happening in the world of FDC3?

At FINOS we’re gearing up for the Open House/Regtech Global Showcase & Member’s Meeting on June 14th and 15th. We’ve reached full capacity for June 14th, and have limited space for June 15th, but if you’re a FINOS member, sign up to the waitlist and we will make our best effort to get you registered (once spots open up we’ll let you know).  

FDC3 1.2 Agent Conformance

At OSFF in December 2022 I was really pleased to announce in the keynote our first FDC3 1.2 Conformant Desktop Agents by Finsemble, Tick42 and FINOS’ own open source FDC3 Sail. 

Since then, we’ve had OpenFin FDC3 1.2 Conformance back in March and now I’m very pleased to announce new conformant Desktop Agents!

First, Nick Kolba and Co’s Connectifi v1.1.0 was tested and passed back on 26th April and following that..

Glue 42 achieving conformance for Glue Core on 24th May. This means that Tick42 now has 3 products conforming to the FDC3 1.2 standard - Glue Enterprise, Glue Core+ and Glue Core.  Huge congratulations to both teams! 

The big question is - what will we announce at the Member’s Meeting about conformance?  

FDC3 Language Bindings

In the last blog entry I talked about Yannick Malin’s 5th-place prize-winning FDC3 Identity proof-of-concept at the BMO Hackathon. But, this was certainly not the only FDC3 winner on the podium! In first place, we had Venkateswarlu Muthyala, Tim Jenkel and the rest of the Wellington team with their FDC3 Java API.

Let’s talk about why this is important: so far in the FDC3 standards world, FINOS has published FDC3 bindings only for the typescript language, which makes sense if you are delivering FDC3 applications as web pages in an Electron container (which let’s face it, is the usual case).

But this leaves a lot of legacy code out in the cold, especially big trading systems written in Java or .net which are common in finance. It also ignores adopters of other languages such as Rust, Go, Python which are being picked up in the finance space now because of their utility with AI and Big Data use cases.  

This is a poor state of affairs and can’t continue! Luckily The FDC3 Java Api code is pointing the way for how to do this in Java, and Brian Ingenito’s FDC3 .net API is doing the same for C#.  But for those to work across different desktop agents we need to figure out a standard way for these APIs to communicate with one another.

At the moment, this stuff is pretty experimental in the FDC3 world, but the FDC3 community is starting to think about how these should be integrated into FDC3 proper. Part of the solution looks like being a language-agnostic FDC3 Protocol, currently proposed in the FDC3 Desktop Agent Bridging Workstream. But we need experts in all these programming languages to come and help us figure this stuff out!  

If you have a view (or requirement) around any of this then please get in touch with the maintainers - they’d love to hear from you!

Author: Rob Moffat

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