Fixing the FIX Transport

The 1.2 version of Apache Synapse, the open source lightweight ESB was released on June 2008. One of the most striking features of this release was the FIX transport implementation, mainly due to the fact that most ESBs in the world still do not support the FIX protocol. The Synapse FIX transport implementation which is only two months old at the moment has already made a lot of hype in the world of Software Engineering and SOA. It seems we already got a few interested people (potential clients?) who are at the moment testing and playing with the transport.

Synapse 1.2 ships with two samples that demonstrate the FIX transport module. One of them demonstrates how two FIX endpoints can be bridged using Apache Synapse. The other samples shows how to bridge an HTTP client with a FIX endpoint. Over the last couple of months the Synapse community has worked really hard to further improve the FIX transport implementation and also to identify more exciting usecases for the transport module. As a result we managed to add four new samples demonstrating the FIX transport to the Synapse documentation. These samples are currently available in the Apache Synapse Snapshot and will be most likely included in the next release.

The first of the four newly added samples (sample 259) shows how to bridge a FIX client with an HTTP endpoint. The sample effectively demonstrates how Banzai, the sample FIX blotter that ships with Quickfix/J can be used to send order requests via Synapse to a service listening on HTTP. The sample uses the XSLT mediator to convert the FIX messages into a SOAP messages.

The second of the new samples (sample 260) shows how Synapse can be used to bridge a FIX endpoint with an AMQP endpoint. Here once the FIX message is converted into XML it will be bound to a JMS payload and sent to an AMQP consumer. Since AMQP is used widely in business applications, I believe that this sample will open up the door way to a ton of really cool usecases.

The third sample (sample 261) demonstrates how Synapse can be used to switch between FIX sessions with different versions (BeginString values). The sample successfully bridges a FIX 4.0 session with a FIX 4.1 session but the underlying concepts can be used to bridge virtually any two FIX sessions. One thing worth mentioning here is that the FIX transport implementation of Synapse initially did not support bridging FIX sessions of different versions. But considering the potential usecases, we implemented that feature very recently.

The fourth newly added sample (sample 262) demonstrates how CBR (Content Based Routing) can be done with FIX messages using Apache Synapse. The sample configuration causes Synapse to accept FIX messages over a session, read a certain symbol in the messages and based on the symbol value route the messages to different endpoints.

We also added namespace support to the FIX transport module so that it can properly parse and validate XML based FIX messages with namespaces. Another recent feature addition was improving the way FIX sessions are initialized in Synapse. The initial implementation lazy initializes all the FIX sessions for outgoing FIX messages. That means an outgoing session will not be created until a message arrives for that particular session. However since this leads to fairly large delays we improved the transport module so that the outgoing sessions are also initialized at the startup along with the incoming sessions. (the old way of initializing sessions is also supported)

Currently we are working on adding support for FIX repeated groups. (we already have a feature request for this on the JIRA from one of our users) All in all it seems that the FIX transport module for Synapse is increasingly becoming a very powerful and matured piece of software in a blistering rate.