Broker Client Package Documentation
The BCP, or 'Broker Client Package' is a piece of opensource software.
Ofcourse you can download it
at any time you want, but you will need a username and password for
PolitiCap and you will need to be approved as a PolitiCap stock
broker before you can actually use the software.
The prefab BCP is written in PHP CLI (command line
interface). This means that when you have the PHP command line interface
running on your Linux/Windows PC, you should be able to download the
BCP, configure it and run it in it's very basic form. So the goal here
is simplicity and to allow anybody with a very basic technical
knowledge to act as a broker.
The rest of this document will be very technical for those
that want to 'tweak' their own BCP. Those people that are not
interested in the technical aspects can simply stop reading here
and continue to 'Using the BCP'.
As a stockbroker, obviously you will want to
be able to see all the orders your clients enter. This functionality
is built into the PolitiCap website as well as in the BCP. You will want
to see who your clients are, you will want to approve client signups
and you will want to be able to promote yourself. Furthermore it will
be very convenient for you if your BCP could actively handle all the
trade matching for you (if perhaps there's a match between two or
more of your own clients) or have orders that cannot (yet) be matched
be relayed onto the ECN (Electronic Commerce Network) you use.
All of the above obviously requires a lot of
data access, and this is basically what the BCP gives you. Since the
data is located on the PolitiCap server, the BCP needs some way to
get access to your data. The BCP does so through a mechanism
called 'REST', which means 'Representational State Transfer', a
big word for a programmatic way to access data from a remote
server.
Imagine accessing a webserver (which is what your
browser does all the time) and you would want to retrieve a listing
of all the orders that have the state 'Open'. You could make
an URI for this which looks like
http://www.politicap.eu/bcp_orderlist.php?state=open. Here you specify the URL, http://www.politicap.eu/bcp_orderlist.php and the URN ?state=open
We have always found this terminology to be confusing! Therefore we will simply talk about:
- Servername: http://www.politicap.eu
- Location: /bcp_orderlist.php
- Arguments: ?status=open
Ofcourse this is very simplified. 'http' is after all the protocol, not the servername, etc. etc. But let's just leave it at this.
It is easy to see that when http://www.politicap.eu/bcp_orderlist.php?status=open really exists (and it does!), when we go there using our browser, we could actually get some data from it! When you're already approved as a broker, indeed you could just click on the above link and you would see this data! However, the data comes out in a funny looking format which is called XML. XML is very structured data which can easily be interpreted by a computer program, so while you could click on the link above you wouldn't get anything pretty looking out of that page, just nasty looking text!
So while the /bcp_orderlist.php location is just one
location that the BCP could visit and the argument ?status=open is just
one of the arguments you can pass to this location, are there any more
usefull locations? Well why ofcourse there are! The BCP will use many
of them and in order to let programmers tweak around a bit, we will
supply you here with all possible BCP locations, the arguments you
can pass to them and the results you might expect back when you do!
Ok, so in this document we will document all
the RESTfull BCP pages. There will be many more RESTfull pages
ofcourse, but these will be for Market makers, ECN's, Underwriters
etc. and they will be documented in their own documentation section. That's
right, just like there's a BCP, there will be a Market Maker Client Package
MMCP, an ECN Client Package ECP, etc.
More to come