BullionVault.com - Gold with an open source soul

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/print/113118

22 April 2009, 08:33

BullionVault.com - Gold with an open source soul

by Dj Walker-Morgan

Gold and open source do not normally go together, but at BullionVault, the
combination of both has created an innovative way of trading in the precious
metal

BullionVault Front Page

ZoomThe BullionVault Front Page

Back in 2003, Paul Tustain, founder of BullionVault[1], wanted to buy some
gold and went to Switzerland to do so. It turned out that what was being sold
wasn't actually the gold though, but a "promise of a promise" of some gold.
This is what is called "unallocated gold" where there are various financial
instruments between the buyer and the actual gold. Tustain thought that this
wasn't what people wanted to do and inspired by the idea of online betting
exchanges, brought together a team to create an online gold exchange which
became BullionVault.com. Users can sign up and buy gold, which is physically
held in secure vaults in London, Switzerland and New York, hold on to it for
a storage fee or sell it, all through an online front end. This is called
"allocated gold"; outright ownership of the physical metal. The vaults
themselves are managed by another company and are so secure that it is almost
impossible to get access, even for BullionVault. Users of the BullionVault
systems, once they have bought gold, can offer to buy or sell at the price
they select and the system matches up buyers and sellers. Now, with 100,000
registered users and 13,000 funded clients using the English, French, German
or Italian translations of the site, the service is international and well
established.

BullionVault's "tame" Gold Bar

ZoomBullionVault's "tame" Gold Bar

Despite the large amounts of gold and money involved, at the heart of
BullionVault is an open source soul. The systems behind BullionVault were
created by Kris Jenkins, CTO and Alex Edwards COO and they say they couldn't
have done it without open source. In late 2003, Tustain, Jenkins and Edwards
started development on the software for the back office system for
BullionVault. Some decisions were already made for them though; they had
inherited a real time accounting and settlement system which used Oracle as
the database. The real time nature of the accounting system was essential to
the plan as they would need to be able to create financial reporting by the
day and by the minute. But around this accounting system, open source would
be used to develop the exchange.

Next: Developing the exchange

Developing

The exchange software itself is Java based, using Apache Tomcat for serving
web pages and Spring as an application framework. Originally, the system was
developed using the Apache Struts[2] web framework, but over time,
frustrations with Struts led them to move to SpringMVC[3] which has made
development a lot easier. "When we started experimenting with SpringMVC, it
quickly made Struts feel like a first attempt at a web framework" says
Jenkins "SpringMVC doesn't take away any control - it's still fairly
low-level - but it has made development much simpler and faster". As an
example, Jenkins pointed to SpringMVC's flexible data binding "which became
vital when we went multi-language as it made it possible to be more
intelligent about number formatting styles across multiple locales". The
switch reduced the size of the code base significantly and the change "just
made life much simpler". "Spring has one of the cleanest architectures I've
ever encountered" adds Jenkins.

Kris Jenkins

ZoomKris Jenkins, CTO of BullionVault

For mapping their Java classes to the database, they went with iBatis[4]
while for reporting, they use Eclipse BIRT[5] for creating internal reports.
"It's great that we can go from a working SQL query to a web report with
standardised formatting very quickly" which has allowed them to produce
intranet reports like "How much gold have we sold each day in the past
week?". BIRT's PDF generation is also used to generate statements and
contract notes as it is fairly easy to integrate into batch processes; "It's
also good at not getting in our way. Easy stuff's easy, hard stuff's harder".
Jenkins says they recently looked at Oracle's Apex but found it "made easy
stuff trivial, tricky stuff impossible ... even the set up was tricky". BIRT
is not without it's issues though. "The documentation is patchy and almost
always out of date. Compiling the source code is a real headache".

>From the start, the developers had performance in mind, with ehcache[6] used
to help speed response times for users. The developers contributions back to
the open source community have typically been performance patches for
libraries as a result of this work.

Development, of course, is not just about code but also about maintaining the
code. Open source plays its part here with the company using Bugzilla[7] to
track issues with the software and ensuring quality by using JUnit[8] and
Spring mocking to create tests for the system. The switch to SpringMVC made
creating unit tests much easier.

One element which isn't open source are the BullionVault bots. The company
uses bots, software programmes which act as customers, to trade within the
exchange on its behalf. Bots are used to create liquidity in the exchange by
encouraging trade in gold to take place, using simple trading strategies. The
bots are proprietary to BullionVault, but the company has an open API[9] to
allow third party bots and applications to trade such as
Bullionbetting.com[10]. The bots do have an impact on code quality though as
they do exercise the system; often, the bots are the exchanges heaviest
users. Jenkins recommends the use of automated bots as part of a quality
strategy for online exchanges because of their ability to generate work for
the system and report back on the systems' function. He adds that they have
considered open sourcing the bots themselves, but it "hasn't happened yet".

Next: The back and front office

The back office

Beyond the development of code, there's the deployment of the result of the
code. Again, BullionVault have evolved their approach thanks to not being
locked in by proprietary software. Initially, the servers ran the Fedora Core
Linux distribution. As time moved on though, Fedora became more experimental,
feeding back into Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, but always running ahead. With
this in mind, BullionVault moved to CentOS, the Linux distribution which is
compiled from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source. This allows the company to
use an operating system which is deployed as an enterprise operating system
without having to subscribe to Red Hat's subscription offerings, keeping
costs closer to zero. The move has also given them a more stable Linux and a
more predictable roadmap for operating system deployment.

Infrastructure management also relies on open source. The network is
monitored with Nagios[11], systems are mirrored with Drbd[12], jobs are
scheduled with Quartz[13], loads are balanced with Heartbeat[14] and the site
content is managed with Subversion[15]. With Nagios, BullionVault contributed
to the community with patches to add encryption to the Java/Nagios interface.

Alex Edwards

ZoomAlex Edwards, COO of BullionVault

Not everything is part of the exchange system though. While the help and
support pages are static HTML with Apache Lucene[16] based searching the
BullionVault Gold News site[17] is managed using the open source Drupal[18]
content management system. Edwards found Drupal "a good balance of open
source, easy to set up and straight forward for our human editors", though
there have been occasional frustrations with database and formatting
problems. Jenkins points to the range of Drupal modules; "I've lost count of
the times I've been asked to add a feature to Drupal and found there's
already a module to do it for me". Drupal has also allowed them to create
fully featured websites "in an afternoon" and then hand these on to someone
non-technical to create content and maintain. "Drupal's not perfect", he
adds, "I try never to look at the underlying database structure for fear it
will haunt me at night - but as techies we can fire & forget and our editors
almost never need sup requirement, for security purposes, is the recording of
all calls. For this, BullionVault used the Asterisk PBX software; Edwards
implemented this using the TrixBox[19] distribution, which bundles Linux,
Apache, Asterisk, MySQL and PHP. Trixbox was simpler to set up than
assembling their own Asterisk system and is already based on CentOS.

Next: Lessons worth learning

Lessons worth learning

We asked what advice the BullionVault team would offer to other companies.
Edwards suggested a process of constant change; "Evolve your systems, It's
amazing how much you don't have to spend for good quality components".
Jenkins added to that saying "Pick good active open source growing with you,
even if they are in beta". As for architecture and deployment, Edwards
offered "Plan for clustering and scalability and redundancy" while Jenkins
offered the simpler "Plan for one machine blowing up". Both agreed on the
importance of adopting open source as fundamental part of developing and
deploying an online service, but also the open source is a means to an end,
rather than an end in itself.

Lego BullionVault Logo

ZoomThe BullionVault logo, rendered in Lego

The team at BullionVault are proud of what they have created with limited
people resources. "For two of us to create a service this big using open
source and banking technology is impressive", says Jenkins. The company now
has fifteen employees, mostly in the front office dealing with customers.
Asked what features they'd like to see in open source in the future, Edwards
hoped to see Thunderbird expand its capabilities to include a customer
relationship management extension and make the front office more integrated.
Jenkins was looking for more real time accounting applications for the back
office to handle the flow of transactions that a web site which manages money
(or gold) needs to keep tabs on their financial status.  Conclusion

Using a pragmatic mix of open source and proprietary software, BullionVault
has created a novel way to deal in gold twenty four hours a day. It's that
approach which has seen them awarded a Queens Award For Enterprise for
Innovation[20] this year.

URL of this article:

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/113118

Links in this article:

  [1] http://bullionvault.com

  [2] http://struts.apache.org/

  [3] http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/mvc.html

  [4] http://ibatis.apache.org/

  [5] http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/

  [6] http://ehcache.sourceforge.net/

  [7] http://www.bugzilla.org/

  [8] http://www.junit.org/

  [9] http://www.bullionvault.com/help/xml_api.html

  [10] http://www.bullionbetting.com/

  [11] http://www.nagios.org/

  [12] http://www.drbd.org/

  [13] http://www.opensymphony.com/quartz/

  [14] http://www.linux-ha.org/Heartbeat

  [15] http://subversion.tigris.org/

  [16] http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

  [17] http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/

  [18] http://drupal.org/

  [19] http://www.trixbox.org/

  [20] http://live.bullionvault.com/Queens_Award_2009.do