trading-shim 090529

trading shim is a command-line and dbms controlled interface to the socket-based API of Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, abbreviated as the IB tws socket api, or simply tws.
That api has a number of advantages for our purposes, including the freely available Trader Workstation, comprehensive feeds and archives for tick and history data, a paper account ideal for software testing, and low transaction costs.
The shim consults the product database at initial startup, and from then on uses in-memory lookup to translate brief text commands from the downstream to the much longer binary requests of the tws api.
trading-shim serializes the resulting event stream and copies the text to any of a number of user-selected output channels. The shim command interface provides an alternative to the existing tws gui interfaces, permitting you to use downstream programs, whether gui or not, to drive the tws through its api.
trading-shim is written in C, and although developed on Linux, trading-shim should be able compile and run on any modern Unix-like platform.

System requirements:
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- Trader Workstation
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- MySQL