Relevance, Inc., a leading Ruby on Rails software development practice specializing in training, consulting and application product development, today announced the completion of its development project for TradeKing, a nationally licensed online broker dealer firm and pioneer in incorporating social networking features into online trading.

Relevance helped TradeKing take its social network to the next level by building a robust community site (http://community.tradeking.com/) where the information shared comes out of the actual TradeKing trading system – ensuring validity. The community was built with Ruby on Rails and features blogs, forums, groups, trade notes, commentary, and daily insights from TradeKing experts on actual member trades, as they happen.

TradeKing Director of Community Development, Mike Massey, interviewed several Ruby on Rails development shops before selecting Relevance. “We chose Relevance due to their experience and cost effectiveness. Relevance met our needs by providing flexibility, speed-to-market and an agile methodology that works in two week iterations, thus allowing for changes and updates in only hours or days – without having to restart the development process,” stated Massey.

“Before we began the project, TradeKing had thought carefully about what they wanted from their community site, and that helped us get started quickly,” outlined Glenn Vanderburg, Chief Scientist at Relevance, Inc. and development lead for the TradeKing project. “Once we started delivering, they were able to refine their ideas, and in some cases the requirements changed considerably. We were able to roll with that and keep the features flowing.”

Rails' architecture is simple and open, making it easy to build interfaces to other systems. Though written in Java, Relevance was able to integrate TradeKing’s trading system with its Rails-built community. Rails can work with Java message queues via a plugin along with a simple web service, which gives the TradeKing community site up-to-the-minute access to accurate information about member trades.

Since Relevance built the community, participation has tripled and community numbers have doubled to include more than 6,000 active members.

Traders can now blog about their trades, the particular stocks traded, and the number of shares – knowing it is all certified by TradeKing. “Since the data comes directly from TradeKing’s trading system, community members learn from each other with the assurance that the information being shared is accurate,” noted Stuart Halloway, CEO, Relevance Inc. “We’re all proud of the end result.”