Online Share Trading

Ask me "what is the worst software you have seen?", and I wouldn't have an answer for you. I have seen thousands of really badly written software but I don't even give them a second glance.

Ask me "What is the worst software you have used?" and I would say it is my stock brokers online trading system. There are dozens of fundamental flows with this application named Atrad.

One would think that a team of software architects would debate for weeks before coming up with a good design for an online share trading system. It's obvious that an architect worth his salt has not been involved in the development of Atrade.

The software actually is nothing more than a frontend for the stock brokers database. Stunning as it may seems, Atrad operates by opening a connection to the oracle database on the broker's server. If you disregard the security implications for the users of the system, can you disregard the security implications for the other clients of the brokerage firm?

You might think that an online trading system would be real time. Not if you are a Sri Lanka. Atrade and the alternative system CDAX used by some other brokers are both written in Java. But what's really amazing is that despite being a Java application, Atrad is available only for windows!! Why on earth write it in java in the first place? why not a real time technology more suited for windows?