Symphony Java Open Source Libraries

Business Problem

Many banks are in the position of wanting to expose APIs and Services via Symphony so that they can be consumed within their own organisation, or to enable business-to-business flows. (Common use-cases at DB include sharing RFQ’s with clients, Axe information or building orders). Generally, bot developers are experts within their specific Information Systems, rather than Symphony specialists. The learning curve is steep for these people to get started on the Symphony platform.

Building software on the Symphony platform is made harder by the lack of availability of high-quality software libraries to use to do this. Although there are existing libraries for building bots on the Symphony platform in various languages, these are all found wanting and contain only basic functionality. Specifically, concerns such as: identity management, integration testing, circle-of-trust, are not well supported. Within the Java ecosystem there are multiple low-level “client” implementations, which are in various ways flawed, and in any case don’t cover higher level functionality.

Proposed Solution

Find a best-of-breed approach to the Java software stack that can be recommended to all Java Symphony developers, rather than leaving them to find the appropriate libraries on their own.

Current State

1. Symphony have various libraries covering some parts of the functionality required. A lot of this is not open-sourced (AFAICT)
2. Finos also have some (now archived) software for low-level API connectivity to Symphony.
3. Deutsche Bank has built a suite of Symphony Java libraries from the ground up which interoperate together, are well documented and field-tested within the bank. This covers the following:

• Bindings: Java-To-Symphony REST API Layer which is code-generated and matches the published Symphony APIs exactly. (This broadly matches the functionality in 2 above, although is nearly all code-generated using Swagger rather than hand-maintained).

• Identity: Manages Symphony identities and allows tests to connect to Symphony without checking secrets into the repository

• Entity JSON: Provides Serialization & Deserialization of Symphony’s JSON Format

• Spring Boot API Starter: Hook up Symphony APIs using Spring’s Auto-wiring, and check health using Actuator. Allows bots to be written in just a few lines of code.

• Spring Boot App Starter: Build Symphony circle-of-trust applications in Spring

• Shared Stream: Allows bots to handle failover when working in a cluster

• FIX JSON: Allows you to send FIX messages via Symphony

In addition we have further pieces of software covering Kore-AI integration and Java-based workflow which will integrate with this stack, and will be open-sourcing these soon.

Existing Materials

All existing DB-open-sourced Symphony Java code is to be found here: https://github.com/deutschebank/symphony-java-client-parent

Maintainers

(Lead) Robert.Moffat@db.com - robmoffat
Abhishek.Sinha@db.com - abhishekspage
Suresh.Rupnar@db.com - sureshrupnar

Contributors

Vladimir.Parnashvili@db.com - vladimirpar
Ivan.Rodriguez@db.com - iromu