2017-08-23 Meeting notes
- Peter Monks
- Aaron Williamson
Table of Contents
Date
Actions items from previous meetings
- Jonathan Christensen: confirm that Symphony intends to open-source the HTML5 app and provide a rough timeline.
- All: If your organization is interested in seeing Symphony support DB's Plexus interbank interop framework, tell Jonathan Christensen.
- Lynn Neir (Deactivated) and All: Review Tick42's proposal for a container API specification, including Leslie's email to the list and Kiril's pull request (especially the TypeScript specification), and comment on the mailing list.
- Former user (Deleted) and Leslie Spiro: follow up with Lynn Neir (Deactivated) to discuss Symphony LLC's strategy regarding Symphony Electron desktop interop/on-behalf-of functionality.
- Lynn Neir (Deactivated): test Container.JS with Symphony Electron if possible
JC & Lynn Neir (Deactivated): check whether documentation of Symphony web app API is accessible
- Aaron Williamson: arrange meetings between member firms and DB re: interest in Plexus
- Jonathan Christensen: Let working group members know whether Symphony LLC is still targeting the end of September for the release of the production Electron container.
Meeting notes
Leslie Spiro: JC, there was an open thing about a formal statement about whether the new Symphony UI, the HTML5 app, was going to be open source.
Jonathan Christensen: We talked about this last time and the message was that we have scheduled a review once the code stabilizes in the Fall, then we’ll be able to say more about timing then.
Leslie Spiro: Plexus we’ll talk about regarding DB’s Symphony plans. From my side, nothing’s happened re: reviewing the container API specification. Colin spent some time with Lynn and sent an email showing ContainerJS opening with Symphony Electron and OpenFin.
Colin Eberhardt: I didn’t talk to Lynn directly. The code he’s writing that targets the new APIs is now available on one of our pods, so I’ve been able to test against that. So I did something similar to what Nick at OpenFin did. I ran it against Container.JS and found a similar set of issues. There are some undocumented APIs left, which Lynn’s aware of, and on OpenFin the window open call doesn’t work, most likely because it’s using window.open() which is vaguely defined and may be worth avoiding, which is why Container.JS does its own windowing for consistency.
Within Container.JS we’re defining a set of APIs we think are appropriate for general usage. Lynn’s got a different set of APIs. We put in a shim layer that translates between them. I think the working group needs to work out whether to focus on the short-term goal, which means getting Symphony running in multiple containers, or whether we want to create an API usable by a range of people, in which case it needs to be a bit better.
Leslie Spiro: And I’ve suspended discussion of that till later in the summer. Not sure what the action was on OBO, but nothing’s happened there so we should carry that forward. I haven’t had any updates on whether the Symphony web app API will be accessible to other applications running on the desktop. JC any update?
Jonathan Christensen: No.
Leslie Spiro: JC, any update on the Electron container release?
Jonathan Christensen: No, our goal is still before the end of the year.
Leslie Spiro: Aaron, could you update that to say the end of the year?
Aaron Williamson: Sounds good.
Leslie Spiro: Ok, that’s the outstanding action items, and there’s no formal next steps, but Slava just made a Jira CONTRIB ticket that I think effectively announced that DB will be open-sourcing Plexus within the Foundation. And that raises the interesting question about whether to address interop in Container.JS or not. Slava, can you give us an update on DB’s plan and how it’s going to time with Symphony and how it will be distributed.
Slava Kryukov: Sure. So a bit of very good news. First, we have indeed finally gotten an open source policy accepted by the C-Suite. We don’t have all the mechanics in place, but this is a minor implementation detail, so the key challenges have been overcome. Second, last month we had an extremely productive two week collaboration with Symphony LLC where we did a proof-of-concept showing that the interop solution runs within Symphony and can invoke interactions through Plexus from Symphony chat.
One of the two key things that needed to happen for us to open source was for Symphony LLC to give the thumbs-up to the interop solution. Now the onus is on us to drop the code into the open source repository, so we need to figure out the implementation of that part of our policy. Questions?
Aaron Williamson: Timeline?
Slava Kryukov: We’re aiming for the end of September, which we think is realistic. The only thing that may delay us is this tooling thing, which should be available at the end of September. Then we can do the integration with LLC.
Leslie Spiro: And this will be dropped to the SSF repository?
Slava Kryukov: Correct.
Leslie Spiro: When you said you can invoke things from Symphony, what do you mean?
Slava Kryukov: In the PoC we created an app in our Symphony dev pod which could connect to the Plexus broker and look up a structured object and determine which actions are available against that object. Then a call was done using a mock launcher mechanism to launch an app and pass the object as context. Then in the application, we’ve been rendering multiple options available to call – two or three apps, for example different trade apps. There’s no reason why the same mechanism couldn’t be used to expose some of the Symphony APIs to desktop applications, subject to additional conversations with Symphony. Because it’s a general-purpose RPC.
Leslie Spiro: Does LLC have a position yet on whether Plexus interop will be included in future releases, and whether applications running on Symphony will have access to that?
Lawrence Miller: As Slava said, we’ve done a PoC and that was a huge step. We’ve previously said that Plexus is something we’re interested provided we could connect it easily enough. On our side, the main question is mainly timing and scheduling it into our product release schedule. And that can only happen after DB open sources, but it’s not something that’s far off in the future. It looks like a small amount of engineering work for us based on the PoC. I think we need to look, either this community or another group, the technical details of how the API works. I think we’re looking to support the kinds of things you’re talking about, obviously there are security concerns, but those are the kinds of things we’re talking about.
Leslie Spiro: I know DB was looking at using the Symphony login as a sort of SSO. Can you talk about how that works?
Slava Kryukov: This is extremely interesting to us. This is likely a second phase, right now we’re looking at federated search rather than federated authentication, which is straightforward. What’s not clear is how an organization like DB will determine whose tokens to trust and whose not to. And this comes down to the security policy of individual organizations, and is a significant challenge to overcome, so we’ll need this community’s input on this. There needs to be an explicit trust relationship with whoever’s providing the tokens. Prior to that, we want to focus on pushing a solution out that doesn’t require federated authentication, between orgs that do not trust each other’s tokens, so public search for example.
Nick Kolba: Is there any documentation available on how the implementation has been done in the PoC, and the interoperability APIs.
Slava Kryukov: It’s the same as in the presentation sent out to the group several weeks ago. I’ll attach it to Jira too. There’s no change, the architecture is exactly as outlined there, but I’m happy to do a refresh on that. Part of the September drop will be detailed documentation on all of this.
Nick Kolba: That would be great. Apologies for having missed that email at the time. That’s the Plexus interop slide deck?
Slava Kryukov: Yep.
Leslie Spiro: I think this is very interesting. We can work out whether this working group is the right place for the ongoing conversation, but it’s an important step for the community.
Nick Kolba: I had a quick note for Colin on the pop-out issue – we fixed it on our side. You can find the code in our repo.
Colin Eberhardt: Great! Could you send me a link?
Nick Kolba: Yeah. And thanks to Lynn for helping me solve that. There’s a dynamic window name OpenFin assigns, so we just override that to the name that Symphony needs to assign.
Colin Eberhardt: Cool, good to hear it was a simple fix.
Nick Kolba: We’re also making progress on our implementation and will have more to show in the next couple of weeks. We’ve got snapshot under way as well as other areas. We’re definitely looking at what the right direction forward for our notification API is, and working with Symphony helps us with that.
Colin Eberhardt: Are you working with Lynn on the undocumented stuff, like logging?
Nick Kolba: Yeah, we’ve worked on some of those things and Lynn’s been really helpful. We haven’t got into logging, because that’s not a major blocker once you stub out the API. But that’s definitely something we’ll revisit with LLC’s input. But it’s a good exercise to do this with the real app because it gives us immediate feedback on what the main use cases are.
Aaron Williamson: JC, any general update on Electron?
Jonathan Christensen: Nothing except that we’re making progress and hitting our milestones, and it’s looking very good. Very close to Minuet feature parity.
Leslie Spiro: Great, so if no one’s got anything else, we’ll finish early and talk again in two weeks’ time!
Action items
Agenda
| Time | Item | Who | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 min | Convene & roll call | ||
| 10 min | Review action items from previous meetings | See Action Items from previous meetings | |
| 20 min | Update from on open sourcing Plexus interop framework | Former user (Deleted) | |
| 5 min | AOB & adjourn |
Attendees
| Name | Organisation | Present? |
|---|---|---|
Former user (Deleted) (chair) | Credit Suisse | |
Leslie Spiro (interim chair) | Tick42 | Y |
| Jonathan Christensen | Symphony LLC | Y |
| Andrew Christie | Ipreo | |
| Goldman Sachs | ||
| ScottLogic | Y | |
| BlackRock | ||
| Mark Hu | Citi | Y |
| Brian Ingenito | Morgan Stanley | |
| Richard Kleter | Deutsche Bank | |
| OpenFin | Y | |
| Citadel | Y | |
| Deutsche Bank | Y | |
| Adam Lancaster | Tick42 | |
| JP Morgan | ||
| Symphony LLC | Y | |
| Symphony LLC | ||
| Ed Sanders | JP Morgan | |
| FactSet | Y | |
| Morgan Stanley | ||
| HSBC | ||
| Ryan Sharp | ChartIQ | |
Alexander  | OpenFin | Y |
| Symphony Software Foundation | ||
| Symphony Software Foundation | ||
| Symphony Software Foundation | Y |
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