Perspective: an open-source success story

The success story of Perspective—a powerful data visualisation component developed and open-sourced by J.P. Morgan—has been published in a new case study by FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation.

Perspective addresses the growing demand in financial services to make complex, real-time datasets visually compelling and easy to use. The story of its development is an exemplar of how open-source culture fosters collaboration. In addition, it demonstrates how by accessing the open-source ecosystem, you can save time and effort by integrating pre-existing software components that address some of your requirements.

In the case of Perspective, this took the form of collaboration between J.P. Morgan and Scott Logic, and the integration into Perspective of D3FC—a collection of components created and open-sourced by Scott Logic that make it easy to build interactive charts with D3.

D3FC is now a mature and robust open-source project, with more than a thousand releases over the last five years. Its capabilities are demonstrated and explained in this blog post by Scott Logic CTO and FINOS Board Member, Colin Eberhardt: Rendering One Million Datapoints with D3 and WebGL.

Having seen a J.P. Morgan presentation on Perspective at a FINOS conference, it was clear to Scott Logic that there were synergies between the two open-source projects. A conversation began around how the D3FC library could enhance Perspective’s existing options for chart views, and a Proof of Concept (POC) was rapidly developed. With the POC accepted by J.P. Morgan, the collaboration began.

Perspective’s modular, plugin framework made collaboration easy. The J.P. Morgan and Scott Logic teams were able to work to a shared plan on different product backlogs with weekly project meetings. After only a few months, Perspective had full integration with D3FC.

As Colin Eberhardt explains, “At Scott Logic, it’s always been important to us to be active contributors to the open-source community, and our advocacy of open source in finance is demonstrated through our longstanding membership of FINOS. We were delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate so closely with J.P. Morgan on Perspective and D3FC, combining two great open-source projects together in a way that resulted in an even better contribution to the community.”

You can read the full story of Perspective’s development on the FINOS website, including how RBC Capital Markets has already rolled out Perspective to over 300 trader desktops.