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India Gets First Silverlight Based Trading Portal
Samir Makwana, Mar 23, 2011 2342 hrs ISTNew ICICI Direct online trading portal is built entirely on Microsoft Silverlight 4.0 platform
At the Microsoft TechEd 2011 event in Bangalore (India), Microsoft and ICICI Securities launched a rich and intuitive version of the online trading portal - ICICI Direct. Apparently, this version of ICICIDirect.com is claimed to be India's first Silverlight 4.0 platform based online trading website. Aimed to offer a more engaging experience for online investing and trading, this portal offers movable widgets and is opt-in. ICICI Direct account holders have to simply log in and then carry on trading with this new RIA experience offering portal.
New ICICI Direct with RIA experience is accessible at https://ria.icicidirect.com and works on modern day web browsers (with Microsoft Silverlight plugin) like IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Do note that this Rich Internet Application based online trading portal requires fairly decent connection. Naveen Prabhu, CTO for Quadwave Consulting, who've developed the ICICIDirect RIA portal said,"Our objective was to provide a user-friendly RIA experience to the online traders and we've achieved it using Silverlight 4.0 platform. Certainly, this RIA version of ICICIDirect.com does require a decent Internet connection to work properly. Loads of data packets are pumped every second to the website's widgets but if the connection cracks, users still get to see the figures instead of crippled interface." Basically, it just freezes till the last fetched information for the particular account.
Rich Internet Applications carry several capabilities of desktop apps and are offered through web browsers. These RIAs give you feel of the desktop applications, consume less memory and the best part is - no installation required. "Microsoft's Silverlight 4.0 platform has been used to create the immersive and engaging experience for ICICIdirect.com users. It's certainly exciting for us that the power of Rich Internet Application using Silverlight 4.0 has been first initiated with the financial sector," said Moorthy Uppaluri, GM-Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft.
The RIA version of the new ICICI Direct portal developed on Silverlight 4.0 offers a grid interface comprising of nine widgets, once the user logs in. These widgets serve different purpose and each widget has been coded to work as independently. So you can drag and arrange widgets in whichever order you prefer. In a way, it reminds of the AJAX-based start pages like iGoogle and Netvibes that allow adding several AJAX modules to one single page.
Quite intuitive and rich looking RIA version of ICICI Direct has several pre-developed widgets which also include the one for graphs. The portal uses a HTTPS protocol based connection hence your entire trading activity is secured. Yagnesh Parikh, Sr. VP - Head IT - Trading, ICICI Securities said, "We already offer a low bandwidth version of ICICI Direct portal. The new version is meant for more engaging experience to our online trading customers. Security of their activities is our top-priority. So we preferred to choose the HTTPS secured protocol for new RIA version of ICICI Direct website right from the beginning."
ICICI Direct doesn't offer commodities trading in order to abide by the RBI guidelines.
Gone are the days when Online Trading was limited to the Share Brokers' office systems. Several interested in online trading now wish to do that with real-time numbers from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange directly. There's no need of any dedicated Terminal (computer) that needs to be connected directly with the NSE and BSE for getting the latest numbers.
Microsoft Silverlight indeed wins a brownie point especially in the India financial sector with this step. In a way, it does challenge the Adobe Flex and Java. At the end of the day, this competition has now initiated an era of richer and intuitive website experiences for Indian consumers.
New ICICI Direct with RIA experience is accessible at https://ria.icicidirect.com and works on modern day web browsers (with Microsoft Silverlight plugin) like IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Do note that this Rich Internet Application based online trading portal requires fairly decent connection. Naveen Prabhu, CTO for Quadwave Consulting, who've developed the ICICIDirect RIA portal said,"Our objective was to provide a user-friendly RIA experience to the online traders and we've achieved it using Silverlight 4.0 platform. Certainly, this RIA version of ICICIDirect.com does require a decent Internet connection to work properly. Loads of data packets are pumped every second to the website's widgets but if the connection cracks, users still get to see the figures instead of crippled interface." Basically, it just freezes till the last fetched information for the particular account.
Rich Internet Applications carry several capabilities of desktop apps and are offered through web browsers. These RIAs give you feel of the desktop applications, consume less memory and the best part is - no installation required. "Microsoft's Silverlight 4.0 platform has been used to create the immersive and engaging experience for ICICIdirect.com users. It's certainly exciting for us that the power of Rich Internet Application using Silverlight 4.0 has been first initiated with the financial sector," said Moorthy Uppaluri, GM-Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft.
The RIA version of the new ICICI Direct portal developed on Silverlight 4.0 offers a grid interface comprising of nine widgets, once the user logs in. These widgets serve different purpose and each widget has been coded to work as independently. So you can drag and arrange widgets in whichever order you prefer. In a way, it reminds of the AJAX-based start pages like iGoogle and Netvibes that allow adding several AJAX modules to one single page.
Quite intuitive and rich looking RIA version of ICICI Direct has several pre-developed widgets which also include the one for graphs. The portal uses a HTTPS protocol based connection hence your entire trading activity is secured. Yagnesh Parikh, Sr. VP - Head IT - Trading, ICICI Securities said, "We already offer a low bandwidth version of ICICI Direct portal. The new version is meant for more engaging experience to our online trading customers. Security of their activities is our top-priority. So we preferred to choose the HTTPS secured protocol for new RIA version of ICICI Direct website right from the beginning."
ICICI Direct doesn't offer commodities trading in order to abide by the RBI guidelines.
Gone are the days when Online Trading was limited to the Share Brokers' office systems. Several interested in online trading now wish to do that with real-time numbers from the Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange directly. There's no need of any dedicated Terminal (computer) that needs to be connected directly with the NSE and BSE for getting the latest numbers.
Microsoft Silverlight indeed wins a brownie point especially in the India financial sector with this step. In a way, it does challenge the Adobe Flex and Java. At the end of the day, this competition has now initiated an era of richer and intuitive website experiences for Indian consumers.
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Pathi
,Bangalore, on Mar 24, 2011 01:45 AM
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