Infragistics and OpenFin: High-Performance UX Across Screens

Fast. Responsive. Rich formatting. Able to handle rapidly-updating, high-volume data. These are all things you want to be able to say describe a trading system. Choosing what to base the system on, however, can be a challenge. In order to create modern, frequently-updated experiences, many developers are turning to JavaScript and HTML5. Meanwhile, legacy rich-client platforms mostly still dominate the field. 

OpenFin + Infragistics

Using OpenFin together with Infragistics tools — such as Ignite UI Components for JavaScript/HTML5 or Infragistics Ultimate UI for Xamarin, financial service apps can provide beautiful, high-performance user experience across the continuum of screens necessary for a financial services app.  

With Infragistics providing its 25+ years of best-in-breed, high-performance UI Data Grids and charts, and OpenFin providing the operating layer, financial services app developers can focus on their core business — not on the widget.

At its core, OpenFin is an operating layer that provides easy APIs to allow multiple windows to share information locally. This circumvents the scenario where a web server relays information between windows, allowing for a more secure, performant experience without the latency or potential security risks that comes with a remote publish/subscribe model — issues  those in the financial services world want to avoid at all costs.

Bi-Modal Solution

With information being shared over the OpenFin InterApp Bus, Infragistics components — already well known for being the fastest and most performant in the industry — really excel. The secure pub/sub between child parent and child windows — using very little code — works both for your new web and mobile technologies, as well as with your existing and future desktop applications. This bi-modal solution allows for app communication in several key scenarios.

First, a parent HTML5 app can communicate via OpenFin with other HTML5 apps in child windows: 

Next, a WPF app can communicate with other WPF apps and and HTML5 apps, each in their respective child windows:

Finally — and importantly — SignalIR can be introduced to the model, allowing the parent app to communicate both with child WPF and HTML5 apps and mobile apps developed with Ultimate UI for Xamarin:

In his 13 June 2017 FinJS London presentation, Jason Beres — Infragistics Senior VP of Developer Tools and 11-year Microsoft MVP — demonstrates how quick and easy it is to use Infragistics and OpenFin technologies to deliver a modern, bi-modal desktop-web solution, all while maintaining your existing rich client investment. 

Deep Dive Demo

For those interested in going into still greater detail, Senior Product Architect Graham Murray deep-dives on this demo, walking you through Infragistics-OpenFin applications, as well as taking you behind the scenes of how it works: 

For more information about building responsive web applications that work with the OpenFin operating layer, visit our Ignite UI product page, where you can download a trial version for free. For more info about bringing fast, beautiful, cross-platform mobile apps that can be integrated into an OpenFin solution, check out our Ultimate UI for Xamarin page.