Distributing Commercial Indicators

[QuantKey_Bruce]

I understand that this is still under consideration, but given that commercial indicator vendors need to protect their IP and not disclose their source code, how can this be handled best for the JavaScript indicators used in the web and mobile platforms?

If the JavaScript is evaluated locally on their computer or mobile device, it seems like it would always be possible to get at the scripts - fairly trivial really. How can this be done in a way that protects vendors' investments and delivers the functionality securely?

This is something that I discussed with Tradovate three years ago, but the only idea afoot at that time was obfuscation, which may be insufficient protection for some commercial indicators and strategies.

What ideas are out there for how this could work in a way that would be secure?

[rockbiter]

I am hoping I'll be able to encapsulate proprietary code in a web assembly module and expose a simple interface to call from javascript.

[MicroTrends]

I am hoping I'll be able to encapsulate proprietary code in a web assembly module and expose a simple interface to call from javascript.

as in WASM? hmmm Blazor is my all time favorite and i hear RUST is great too..,. but how to make it load an assembly... side by side there could be 10000s of vendors dlls...

Could another way would be run the script on a WebAPI and call it from the javascript and draw plots etc so the logic and rules are serverside away from the usual suspects who lurk in the ecosystem. - i was around in the days in fact a decade or more before AJAX whoo hoo.. so im sure their could be a way to do this...in JS i might have to roll up my sleeves again.

[QuantKey_Bruce]

Well, web assemblies (.wasm files) can be decompiled and there are several open source tools that do this, although it would be hard to understand what you're looking at and you would lose all the classes etc. that were in the original language. Still, at some level, they're essentially open.

[backtester831]

How does TradingView do it with paid pine scripts? They figured out both hiding the source code and user permissioning.

[QuantKey_Bruce]

TradingView scripts run on their server, not on the customer's computer.

[QuantKey_Bruce]

In Tradovate, we had the ability to call DLLs, but that only was for when it was running on a Windows desktop environment - it did not work on mobile.

https://tradovate.github.io/custom-indicators/interfaces/dlls.dlls-1.html

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

Hello all,

Thank you for your inquiry on this matter.

We are working at implementing a solution for NinjaTrader Ecosystem vendor products upon the Web platform. We want to ensure that not only are our vendor's products represented and housed in the proper format, but that their Intellectual Property is protected properly.

I encourage you to send our Vendor Relations team any inquiries you have on these items to vendorsupport[at]ninjatrader[dot]com.

We look forward to sharing more information in the future and hearing your thoughts and comments.

[QuantKey_Bruce]

In the first post, I referenced Javascript indicators on the web and mobile platforms. This was in error, as no custom indicators are currently possible on the mobile platform. My question is about the web platform until the mobile platform allows the development of custom indicators.

It may be possible to run the web platform from a mobile device with custom JavaScript indicators running on the web platform, but that would be different than running the mobile app. We need to be careful to distinguish those two situations.

[QuantKey_Bruce]

In Tradovate, we had the ability to call DLLs, but that only was for when it was running on a Windows desktop environment - it did not work on mobile.

https://tradovate.github.io/custom-i...ls.dlls-1.html

I should note that this is no longer the case - Tradovate has since removed the ability to call external DLLs.