Dec 19

Written by: Matt Abar
12/19/2008 5:04 PM

As I've mentioned before, I see one of FinFolio's competitive advantages being the open architecture and plugin nature of our technology. We're making it easy for someone to extend our software and customize it for a particular firm. You'll be able to add fields, create new reports in Crystal, and add custom screens, interfaces and data alerts. We did two Developer Preview releases before the alpha that had some of this functionality available at the object level.

We're turning the Developer Preview into a detailed set of examples of how to do everything from simple scripting of downloads and reports to creating an entire rebalancing plugin with menus and screens. I just uploaded Alpha 1b with the Developer Pack. This contains all the scripting and object model examples from the Developer Preview releases, as well as a new project with sample screens that hook into the FinFolio UI framework.

Note: A few people are waiting on the ability to put custom tabs and fields on existing screens. That's not available yet but we're planning on doing another alpha release in mid-January with examples.

The other big feature in the next alpha will be the rollout of our Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) layer, which lets you log into your database over the Internet. This is an important feature that lets the software scale up to an n-Tier installation with multiple object servers. Most firms don't need that type of extreme scalability but you should take some comfort knowing that, no matter how large you get, you won't ever outgrow us. :-)

Ironically, the SOA layer comes with some speed increases. It's ironic because SOA layers usually add significant overhead. We're seeing 5 MB object queries being turned into 15 MB queries after the SQL data gets wrapped up in multiple transport layers. The speed increase comes from some tuning that Mike's been doing on our non-editable screens like the main client, portfolio and household lists. We've gotten much smarter about how we're retrieving data and we've stopped dragging the entire object down the wire just to display the account name.

Have a nice holiday!

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