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October 8, 2014

4 Things HTML5 Can Do That Will Surprise You


Traders, salespeople and other front-office users are among the most demanding power users of applications in the world. Whether it’s performance, scale or ergonomics, these users’ requirements and expectations are at the very top end of the spectrum. So the conventional wisdom has been that HTML5 can’t satisfy these users — “it’s not ready for prime time.”

The reality is that, for financial use cases, HTML5 can now do everything that Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) can do (and more) on desktop and that iOS or Android can do on mobile. Everything.

Here are four things that you might think HTML5 can’t handle (but it can):

  1. Charting Huge Data Sets
    Sure, a simple or even somewhat complex financial chart works fine using HTML5 frameworks like HighCharts or D3, but what if you need to plot 5 years of data for 125 investment grade names on the same chart? Suddenly things start to become sluggish or break down altogether. Zooming is slow, scrolling is painful. You can only do this with a native application right?

No longer true. A new HTML5 charting engine called ChartIQ has solved this for the industry. Throw in your huge data set, manipulate it, zoom in, scroll the time series. It’s buttery. Native has nothing on it. In fact, good luck creating the same visualizations easily with a native charting package.

  1. High Performance Grid
    The other quintessential financial widget is the grid or table. HTML, of course, handles grids and HTML5 frameworks like SlickGrid make it possible to scroll relatively smoothly through even large datasets. But it’s not native performance.

If you need a grid with 10,000 rows, 300 columns and you’re doing 1000 price updates per second while sorting and filtering, SlickGrid will struggle as will the other HTML5 frameworks out there. But we’re pleased to tell you that this is no longer an HTML5 limitation.

Our engineers at OpenFin have developed a new grid up to financial industry specs that provides native performance. It can handle an unlimited number of rows, hundreds of columns, over 1000 price updates per second and it scrolls as smoothly as native. Scroll fast, yank the scroll bar up and down, filter, sort — it’s as fast as anything you can do with native. And we’re going to be open-sourcing it next month.

  1. Mobile
    One of the biggest concerns around HTML5 is with mobile. Most people are convinced that a native iOS or Android app is faster and slicker than an HTML5 app. We put that theory to the test recently working with a large investment bank. The project was to replicate an existing iOS app in HTML5 so that it would work on both iOS and Android.

The bank was convinced this was not possible so we were told “we don’t expect you to fully replicate the experience but we need you to come close.” Our engineers not only replicated the app but the only way to tell the difference between the iOS version and HTML5 version is that the HTML5 app is slightly faster!

We used Cordova to wrap the HTML5 so that it could be placed in the App Store, but otherwise did not need the native wrapper for anything else. What we found in the development process was that specific techniques were needed to get native performance (stay tuned for our blog on this). But the effort was worth it because the app is truly cross-platform and as beautiful as any native iOS app.

  1. Desktop
    Desktop presents multiple challenges for financial applications. First, most financial users have a legacy web browser that doesn’t support HTML5. This will get resolved over time as firms upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 and install Google Chrome more widely. More importantly, trading applications and other applications currently being built in WPF or Java don’t want to be constrained by the user experience of a web browser (not even Chrome). These applications require a multi-window, multi-monitor experience that enables efficient use of screen real estate.

At OpenFin, our core mission has been to solve this problem for the industry. Our HTML5 runtime enables firms to build with HTML5 and have all the capabilities of native WPF and Java applications. The advantages of this model are game-changing for front-office desktop applications: faster development, no installation, better performance, better user experience and better security. To top it all off, the desktop applications you build are cross-platform and can run on mobile devices.

Conclusion
HTML5 has been evolving quickly with enormous investment from Google, Apple, Microsoft and many others. Whether you need high performance charts or grids or you need native experience on mobile and desktop, HTML5 is not just ready for prime-time, it’s redefining what prime-time means.

For more information:
Contact us at info@openfin.co.
Follow us on Twitter: @openfintech

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