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Technology Stocks : DATEK Web Pages -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Tara who wrote (116)	8/20/1998 10:51:00 PM
From: Gorak Shep	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 205

Jon, it is indeed possible to write applications that can enter and confirm the status of orders to Datek. I wrote one for myself more than six months ago in Java. It's not all that hard. Figuring out the protocol of the express order entry and daily activity pages gives you most of what you need to know. You can even generate cancellation of orders once you get the tracking number from the order entry response even before the order appears in open orders or daily activity. And it is easy to use Java threads to do many things in parallel like submitting several orders simultaneously while monitoring daily activity and getting quotes. Of course, once you build such an application, you can extend it in lots of interesting ways. You can error check your orders for consistency and completeness before sending them to the broker which gives you immediate notice of error, including things like buying power limits. You can extend it to more than one broker. My order entry has a drop down menu that lets me select which of the 3 datek express orders to use or even a different broker like Brown which I am now in the process of adding. Java and the transparency of http/html is very empowering. Parsing html responses is a bit of a pain, especially when the html is not all that well written and non-conforming but it is workable. It would be even better if datek and other brokers would would implement and publish an API for more efficient programmatic communication. Then it would be easier to build more reliable third party interfaces. Right now, every time datek changes the html output even for cosmetic reasons, I have to go update my code. But it's worth it because it is an order of magnitude better than a browser interface.