OpenFin on Electron: We're All-In

In February, we shared our findings on security and performance challenges with Electron, the open-source project we are incorporating into OpenFin. In a financial industry context where security and performance are paramount, the challenges are real and resolving the issues has not been an easy undertaking. However, it has been well worth the effort and today we’re excited to announce that we are all-in on Electron.

We’re all-in today and we’re committed to the project going forward. We have been able to isolate the changes we have made to allow us to easily consume future versions. That means we can stay on top of Electron and we will not be forking the project.

Over the past month, we have been consulting with our Technical Architecture Working Group and, earlier this week, we presented the group’s unanimous recommendation to our full Advisory Board which includes 13 of the largest financial institutions and trading platforms in the space:

1. Incorporating Electron into OpenFin is the correct decision
2. OpenFin’s changes to Electron’s security and networking architecture are essential
3. These changes have been isolated sufficiently to enable effective maintenance going forward
4. OpenFin’s development should continue on top of Electron to benefit from future improvements

Our engineering team is working hard to put the finishing touches on our 6.0 release which incorporates Electron. The pay-off is huge:

1. OpenFin will run on Windows, Mac and Linux
2. Upgrades to new Chromium versions will be significantly faster
3. We will be able to leverage Node securely within the container
4. The new architecture makes it much easier for us to add new features and APIs

Once our 6.0 release has moved to “Stable”, we will be open-sourcing the OpenFin container under an Apache 2.0 license. All of the changes we have made to Electron will be part of our open-source project. Enterprise features and components outside of the container will remain under our commercial offering.

Please send email to info@openfin.co if you have any questions and watch this space for our upcoming 6.0 release announcement.