Folks, I'm resurrecting Uptick as a real-time data and execution backend built on top of Erlang/OTP. There's more in the Google group and in my blog. The product will be open source so I'm looking for you to contribute ideas, critique and suggestions. Thanks, Joel
Just to elaborate a bit... Trading systems are essentially processes that respond to quote messages. They must always be up and running. Market data and execution feeds are your basic protocol handlers and of course Mnesia is the data server, shared by all trading systems. Erlang is built around the notion of processes and concurrency and Mnesia is the built-in real-time distributed database. Telcos are using Erlang to build 911 switches to be put in the closet and taken down for maybe 5 minutes out of a year. Fault-tolerance, fail-over is part of the Erlang platform and processes (trading systems) don't care where on the Erlang cluster they are running. Trading systems (processes) can be updated on the fly and new code will take effect transparently. You can also add new nodes to the Erlang cluster on the fly for dramatic scalability. I believe that Erlang is ideally positioned to run and monitor trading systems and scale up to trade as many markets as needed. I'm planning to create a front-end with AJAX on top of Yaws (the Erlang web server) and use the canvas HTML component for drawing stock charts.