I’m writing trading software called A better Trader. For the web UI, I started using some basic JQuery and JQuery UI, with a mind to kick the tires on Bootstrap. I dug in and after looking at a bazillion frameworks and libraries (some fading, some up and coming, NONE really owning it)… K.I.S.S. is ruling the day. I’m finding myself happy with the following:
- HTML5 with support for multimedia, flexboxes, dragon droppings, etc.
- JQuery && (JQuery UI || bootstrap)
- D3 for all things visual… so good…
- iframes! Yep! API calls typically return SVG-based graphic components in iframes, and API parent pages combine them into application-like views.
On the back end, I’m doing RESTful services with boost ASIO. It’s a light clean set of tools. I will probably stand up bootstrap on the front end, and node.js on the back end, for comparison. We’ll see how it goes.
Update: X-Frame headers in a lot of modern APIs and html really fuck with iframe support. What a waste. You can fight it with things like the Ignore X-Frame headers chrome extension, “Drops X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy HTTP response headers, allowing all pages to be iframed.” But really not worth it, I’m not asking my users to install extensions to view my web pages. So… back to Ajax extraction of API JSON, and hand-crafted JavaScript formatting code. Cest la vie.
Update: my release of quick-http means I’ll be focusing on serving up my own html, but quick-http is making it really easy. Onwards.