Algo Designer wrote on 07/14/08 at 14:53:55:qroach wrote on 07/11/08 at 17:28:29:ActiveQuant.org is another JAVA-based framework for mechanical trading.
Interesting. I did not come across this product before. Thank you for sharing the info. Have you tried using it? I might give it a go in the next few days.
The documentation is somewhat limited, so I will have to browse through the source code.
Yes, I have tried it and even spoke to the developers. The guys are trying to do a good design and robust structure and inviting everybody to contribute. But there are some problems which might not be problems for you:
1) Documentation is virtually absent. Little bits that are available quickly become irrelevant because of item 2:
2) Project is constantly evolving and I don't quite get their idea about inter-version compatibility. They released 1st version then re-factored the core components completely. While I worked on it and found some bugs they said the bugs are fixed already in the main trunc. But the main trunc got re-designed completely. So, I had to fix it on my local copy and make it work just for me.
3) Newbies are welcome to contribute on some sideline features but they are not allowed to check in their changes to the source code on the main projects. You have to spend some time and get credit in order to be allowed to do anything serious. But you can make a suggestion even for some drastic changes - they are happy to discuss it.
4) The short intro that you can use might be relevant to the 1st version only. But the 2nd etc. versions have totally different domain models. The same about sample applications, unit tests, spring XML config files etc... In short, their thurst to re-factor everything is quite a distraction.
Actually, I haven't looked at the project web-site for quite a while and few thing could have changed since then.