Alice
Alice, a complete market data distribution system for NeXTStep, allowed real-time distribution of data from suppliers such as Reuters, Knight-Ridder and other digital-data services across a local or wide area network. This client/server system offered a series of display and analysis tools to view and manipulate the data, including a powerful alarms/trigger system, a series of graphing programs, interfaces to all of the popular NeXTStep spreadsheets and data-modeling tools and simple tools to view the data as with more conventional market information systems.
Alice allowed traders to completely manipulate and customize their view and use of market data. Users could plug together different modules, for instance, sharing data from one market into a spreadsheet, performing some analyses and then sharing the results of those analyses with others on the network. Alice puts the data in the hands of the trader and was designed to be as simple to use as possible, while offering no real constraints on what, how, or where available data was displayed.
Alice also provided separate interfaces to Database Kit for archival storage and database building, and a complete object toolkit that covered both the physical distribution of data around the network and objects that use it inside applications. Developers could buy an Option object, for instance, that knows how to keep an up-to-date price and calculate its theoretical value according to a standard model.
Xexos Ltd.