atacama

What is it?

Atacama is a web client application for my turbine server-side technical analysis engine. I originally designed the-turbine specifically so that everything could be viewed in Kibana without the need for a separate client app. Atacama was really conceived as a way for me to learn how to program in angular-js and (hopefully) demonstrate how easy it is to write powerful, single-page applications with angular-js and off-the-shelf open-source components with the minimum of code.

As I have developed the app, some interesting opportunities for optimisation above a Kibana-only approach have emerged. One of these is to only calculate indicators and strategies for markets, stocks and interests of the users. Anything that becomes an interest of the user will be a catch-up job for the-turbine, which will then do it as fast as possible. In reality, this is a better fit for real enterprise problems such as ticking risk calculations where is it just not feasible to calculate everything all the time. Of course for pro-active full-market trading, everything will need to be analysed all the time. A balance must therefore be struck.

Further down the line, this minimum-runtime plus burst-on-demand approach will provide for some interesting horizontal scalability work. This should give me some nice real world reasons to use the emerging auto-scaling features in products such as OpenShift.

DO NOT USE THIS APP FOR REAL TRADING !!

What does it looks like?

The dashboard currently looks like this. All the 'widgets' are resizable and moveable, just like a Kibana dashboard.

THE ABOVE SCREENSHOT DOES NOT SHOW REAL PRICES! THEY ARE MADE UP WITH RANDOM NUMBERS!

How does it work?

It is a HTML5/Angular-JS single-page application that runs in a web browser. It communicates with three principal back end components...

• elasticsearch Using a factory-provided elasticsearch javascript client. Ultimately, this client communicates via the elasticsearch rest API. Historic data is fetched from elasticsearch for presenting to the user. My turbine server project also has spring-data-elasticsearch and some rest APIs to provide the same data. This will allow me to swap easily between the two to try out different architectures.
• rabbitMQ Real-time data is streamed to Atacama using Stomp over Websockets. Thanks to a plugin, rabbitMQ is able to act as a websocket broker for Atacama. It is actually very easy to swap rabbitMQ for a native spring-boot solution and I will be experimenting with scalability at some point to see which is the best option.
• the-turbine Using spring-boot provided bespoke rest APIs. This is for control only and is not used for data at the moment, although as explained above it is easy for me to make it the sole point of contact for Atacama if I so wish.

How do I use it?

Please note that this app was recently re-scaffolded from angular-generator to generator-gulp-angular. This was done because the latter scaffold appears to more closely align with the angular-styleguide.

The easiest way to get it up and running is to clone this repo and then build it. Make sure you have git, node, bower and gulp installed then run something like the following...

git clone https://github.com/the-james-burton//atacama/atacama.git atacama
cd atacama
npm install
bower install
gulp serve

Then browse to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the app. For it to actually work and show something, you will also need to get the-turbine working.

You can also run gulp build for building a distributable for nginx, gulp test to run the tests and gulp serve for preview. When development reaches a sensible point, I will provide a distributable via github 'releases' tab which can be deployed into nginx.

What is it built on?

I am, of course, standing very much on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, part of the fun is finding these giants and then standing on their shoulders. In this project, I have set out to write a business application and therefore I want to write as little code as possible. This project is generated with yo angular-gulp-generator. This gives me a number of core angular-js components, as well as bootstrap and sass. In addition to those, I have found a number of very helpful open-source projects that deserve a special mention...

• angular-moment Easy use of the essential moment-js from within angular-js.
• angular-nvd3 Does great dynamic charts really easily.
• angular-gridster A fantastic dynamic dashboard.
• AngularStompDK Very nice stomp integration for angular-js.
• elasticsearch The factory elasticsearch javascript client.
• lodash An awesome functional programming library for javascript.
• restangular An alternative REST client for angular-js which I find easier to work with.
• stomp-websocket The defacto stomp over websockets implementation for javascript.

What is already done?

• angular service separation There is reasonable separation of functionality into service classes. This will continue and be strengthened as I continue developing.
• tests for services The angular services are tested via Jasmine and Karma.

What is going to be done soon?

• styling, logo and tidy up The UI is pretty rough at the moment with very little custom formatting. Most of what you see is the default look of a yeoman app with bootstrap and sass. I want to do some unique styling, largely as a way to get familiar with CSS, SASS and bootstrap.
• ability to choose indicators DONE
• ability to chose strategies DONE
• more refactoring I tend to deliver early, let code evolve and refactor later as patterns emerge. This works well when trying new technologies, which I am doing all the time in the project.
• tests for controllers I will try and ensure that more of the code is tested, particularly the angular controllers.
• persistent dashboards
• text-based content

What is going to be done in the long term?

• DevOps When functionally complete and stable, I want to ensure that this project is easily deployable into nginx, perhaps wrapped in a docker container and scaled via OpenShift. I would also like to look at a CI/CD pipeline that fabric8 could provide. This is a chunky piece of work and is likely to be combined into one effort alongside my associated turbine project when I feel everything is sufficiently complete.

What is unlikely to be done?

• angular2 Typescript and various other things in angular2 look awesome, but this project is going to stay as angular-js. When I do decide to make the jump to angular2 it will be when that it is a little more mature. I will also create a brand new project instead of refactoring this one. For now, I want to concentrate on angular-js and get better at it.
• zurb foundation So I have bootstrap from Yeoman. That will do just fine for now.

Where did the name come from?

The Atacama desert is a barren, near waterless place. I believe it has a 'flowering desert' phenomenon whereby vast areas of seemingly lifeless land burst into flower upon receiving rainfall. Of course, you have to be in the right place to see it. This metaphor holds true, I think, for technical (and fundamental) stock market analysis. The analysis alerts you as to where you need to be to see the flowering happen. Plus, the name Atacama didn't already seem to be taken by any other software project. Pushing it a bit, Atacama could also be a backronym such as Automated technical analysis, combined and made available.