[srazzaque]

I hear your pain... There's definitely brokers doing some strange things out there, or being overly sensitive to the order of fields. Let's not even talk about repeating groups.

> custom delimiters

Surely you mean custom _message_ delimiters, not field delimiters?

In any case I think it's a foolish endeavour to think that if a broker says "we conform to FIX4.4" to ever take that at face value. Agree that the conformance test always reveals the true extent of conformity.

But zooming out a little, despite these challenges, I'd say you're still in a better position than having N endpoints where 1 gives you a Java library with its own ridiculous threading model, another gives you a Python library that calls a HTTP endpoint (that you need to provide an OAuth token for), and yet another that only has a hosted C# interface. That's where we're headed towards.

[nurettin]

Yes I meant repeating group delimiters. What I do like about fix clients (not fix protocol) is the extra value they provide by keeping your sessions alive, tolerating hot restarts, logging in and out on schedule and managing multiple sessions. Things you have to craft when building rest clients. Other than that, I see absolutely no difference between going through a conformance test and reading rest APIs. It is basically the broker's custom designed API under the guise of a so-called industry standard fix protocol.

[srazzaque]

> What I do like about fix clients (not fix protocol) is the extra value they provide by keeping your sessions alive, tolerating hot restarts, logging in and out on schedule and managing multiple sessions.

I agree somewhat, but I think the protocol needed to come first. Can you honestly say that in its absence, multiple clients would be able to implement these behaviours in a uniform manner?

The fact that there's a concept of a "session" demarcated with LOGON/LOGOUT, sequence numbering, resend semantics, heartbeating - all this had to come from... somewhere.

Put another way: if you get 10 brokers developing their own REST/HTTP API's, what is the chance they'll normalise on a similar set of core concepts?

[nurettin]

One earthly concern is that, because of this unified interface myth, management will think that once you integrated with one broker, the others come free because FIX.

Oh, you need another week or two with the other broker? Why? We spent so much just to get the industry standard API.

Sorry I'm too jaded to appreciate sequence numbering and the industry standard logout message format that fix provides at the given time.

About your point on rest, I do acknowledge the difficulties you're mentioning, of every broker requiring different rest messages to do the same thing. I've come across brokers which accept single orders and grouping in different messages. The delay and errors it causes is insufferable.

The problem is, there has not been a body enforcing unity across brokers. Fix is a nice try, but it is left alone in the woods without any restrictions as to what brokers can or cannot alter. I would like this pointed out and heard of more and that's it.