A GCM Solution for Leveraging Server-side JMS Functionality to Android-based Trading Application

Abstract

The paper presents our solution for a message oriented communication mechanism, employing Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) on the client-side, and Java Message Service (JMS) on the server-side, in order to leverage JMS functionality to Android-based trading application. Our ongoing research has been focused upon conceiving a way to expose the trading services offered by our academic trading system ASETS to a mobile trading application based on Android platform. ASETS trading platform is a distributed SOA implementation, with an original API based on JMS. In order to design and implement an Android based client, able to intercommunicate with the server-side components of ASETS, in a manner consistent with publisher/subscriber JMS communication model, there was particularly necessary to have object imbedded messages, produced by various ASETS services, pushed to the client application. While point-to-point communication model could be resolved on the client-side by employing synchronous HTTP socket connections over TCP/IP, the asynchronously generated messages from the server-side had to reach the client application in a push manner.Keywords: Trading Technologies, JMS, GCM, Android Bridge Servlet, MOM(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)1 IntroductionMessaging and message oriented mid- dlewares (MOM) have revolutionized, over the past decade, the software solutions that can be delivered through service oriented ar- chitectures. Java Message Service (JMS) in- terface, in particular, has proved to offer the most flexible and opened manner for design- ing complex distributed software systems, ranging from social intercommunication ap- plications, to enterprise resource planning, internet banking, trading, and generic data dissemination [1],In tandem with the messaging solutions em- ployed on the enterprise server-side, Android powered mobile devices have become in- creasingly popular, and the diversity and the complexity of applications that the platform supports, open novel perspectives upon the way distributed computing and information technology impact our daily life and busi- nesses.Our research project intends to expand the reach of ASETS trading platform toward the users of mobile devices powered by Android OS.ASETS trading platform features a distribut- ed architecture, service orientated, being im- plemented entirely in Java, and having an original application programming interface (API) designed and built upon JMS [2], [3], Since the JMS libraries jms.jar and imq.jar, required to access the messaging interface that facilitates the communication with the message provider (OpenMQ), are not cur- rently available for the Android platform, we needed to explore a different approach that would provide a seamless communication mechanism between a trading client, residing on a mobile Android device, and the ASETS trading platform.ASETS platform offers a sophisticated API for supporting rich Java applet trading cli- ents, and provides services such as:* Order Management Server (OMS);* Portfolio Management Server (PMS);* Exchange Simulation Engine (ESE), which contains the order matching algo- rithm;* Pseudo Random Order Generator (PROG), to create liquidity within the simulation market;* Delayed Data Feed (DDF), for feeding the trading simulation platform with real world pricing data, captured from Bu- charest Stock Exchange (BSE).Such a JMS based API could not be exposed out of the box to an Android based trading GUI. There have been researches and devel- opments prior Google Cloud Messaging for Android introduction, for interconnecting ap- plications running on mobile devices with JMS based systems [4], [5],In the context of targeting to design and build a trading client application for Android OS, Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) service of- fers a messaging mechanism with the follow- ing main characteristics [6]:* allows third party application servers to send messages to Android-based appli- cations;* offers the ability to deliver messages to an Android application on an Android device, even if the application is not running - as long as the Android based application is set up with the proper broadcast receiver and permissions, the system will wake up the application via Intent broadcast when a message arrives;* the messaging service does not provide any built-in user interface or other han- dling for message data; GCM simply passes raw message data received from the producer straight to the Android ap- plication which, subsequently, has full control of how to handle it. …