ideafutures Project Page
(Please excuse the spartan page style.)
You can download the code here.
The most well-known market powered by this software is the Foresight Exchange.
A demo site that shows the new UI is usually running here.
To log in, you can use names 'user1' or 'user2', with passwords the same.
The fx-devel mailing list can be used to discuss features, patches, etc. You can subscribe to it
here.
Development Plan
Though the code base is pretty stable, there are certainly some things that need improvement. If you'd
like to help out, please join the mailing list (details above) or contact me directly (ideo AT ideosphere dot com).
- Simpler installation instructions and/or an installer program that avoids some of the manual steps.
- Better price plotting. Existing price plots are kind of crude looking, and don't show the first trade
in a claim. A gnuplot guru might be able to help, or perhaps a different plotting implementation is called for.
- Simple market maker. It would be great to have this as an option for each new claim, to increase liquidity.
- UI improvements. The newer UI (link above) is quite a bit simpler than the main Foresight Exchange one, but
there's still lots of room for improvement, different approaches, etc.
There are some other, more major, changes that we might contemplate. Chief among these would be the move to a
relational database for persistence, and a control flow structure that doesn't require processes to be started
(this requires the administrator to have shell access, and so isn't a good fit for cheap web-based co-location
services). However, both of these are handled by the newer Java version I'm working on -- it's servlet
based (and so runs inside a container such as Tomcat), and uses PostgreSQL for persistence. It's still in
alpha, but I'll probably open source it, too. However, the Perl and Java versions will likely serve different
niches, so I'd be delighted if someone wanted to put similar changes into the Perl version.
20050830 - Ken Kittlitz