This delivery advances a partnership forged earlier this year, with TransactTools contributing source code, resources, and support to QuickFIX.

QuickFIX was first released into open source in early 2001. It has since gained worldwide popularity and acceptance as a production-quality FIX implementation. QuickFIX continues to provide an up-to-date implementation for anyone to use as they see fit. TransactTools development of the browser-based interface allows QuickFIX users a lightweight application to start and stop FIX connections, as well as monitor characteristics of those connections such as sequence numbers and connection status.

Sam Johnson, CEO of TransactTools, explains: "Having emerged as a true, global standard for electronic trading connectivity, FIX is poised to remove the biggest technical barriers to efficiently moving financial securities transactions around the globe. As a true open source initiative, QuickFIX can now remove the cost barrier for firms that want to trade electronically but to date have been priced out of the market. We feel it is incumbent on the commercial software players in the space to support an initiative like this. It's the right thing for our industry. This is the first of what will be many contributions of code to the QuickFIX project by TransactTools, and we encourage other vendors to step up and participate with us."

The basic technology that enables a trading firm to communicate via FIX, commonly called a FIX engine, has become increasingly commoditized in recent years. FIX engine software functions as specialized messaging middleware for communicating transactions, and while there are many commercial FIX engines on the market today, the differentiation among these products - except at the enterprise level - is negligible. By partnering with QuickFIX, TransactTools aims to promote adoption of FIX more broadly among smaller firms.

According to Oren Miller, the creator of QuickFIX, "QuickFIX was always designed to be a raw implementation of the FIX protocol, humming along invisibly in the background. Contributions such as this, which are built on top of the core engine, bring about a fuller and more visible system. The more companies make similar investments in technologies surrounding QuickFIX, the more our team can focus purely on maintaining a solid up to date implementation of the underlying protocol."