A TRANSACTION EXECUTION SYSTEM INTERFACE AND ENTERPRISE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE THEREOF

摘要

The present invention provides an add-on transaction system that interfaces a network of users with an existing on-line transaction execution system, without requiring significant modifications to the functionality and/or protocol of such transaction execution system. This is accomplished by providing a set of novel application programmer interfaces (API) which allows integration of specific transaction applications within the transaction system with virtually any existing transaction execution system on practically any platform. More specifically, two separate APIs are provided, a "transaction execution" API ("TE API") and a "transaction alert" API ("TA API"). The TE API provides the functionality of delivering trade information and user requests to the execution system, and the TA API allows the execution system to deliver real-time information to the user. The cooperation of the two APIs with the transaction system's core functionality provides an extremely flexible and secure way to implement two-way communication without actually modifying the transaction application itself. In another aspect of the present invention, the transaction system is implemented to receive user transaction requests via IP networks (such as the Internet which uses the "transmission control protocol/Internet protocol" ("TCP/IP")). In a further aspect of the present invention, the transaction system is implemented to receive transaction requests via a wireless gateway, and more specifically via a digital packet-switched wireless gateway, which may be connected via the IP network to the transaction system. In a specific embodiment of the present invention, a financial transaction system is disclosed. According to yet another aspect of the present invention, an enterprise system having a novel unified architecture is disclosed which may be adopted for the IP network-based transaction system of the present invention. The enterprise system makes use of a set of APIs that renders the enterprise applications platform independent. The enterprise system consists of an enterprise system manager and a number of application servers. The application servers are capable of running applications on remote computers and present a highly reliable and scalable system for deployment.