Uptick: Tick-based futures trading engine .NET or Java

["Joel Reymont" <joelr@xxxxxxxx>]

Folks,

I want to build from scratch a lean and mean tick-based futures trading
engine. The engine will be open-source and include the basics such as
data storage, backtesting, optimization. This is my personal project
outside of the SmartQuant umbrella.

I created a project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/uptick/ and will
start gathering requirements shortly. 

I plan to leave charting to third-party toolkits such as Dundas Chart
(http://www.dundas.com) and focus on things like distributed
optimizations on a server farm. Keeping the basic engine open-source
would help it stay performance-oriented and well-documented. 

I chose the Apple open-source license because I rather like the way Apple
based Mac OSX on FreeBSD but is able to derive revenue from add-ons like
the Aqua GUI, Quartz graphics engine, etc. I would like people to base
their own closed for-profit products on Uptick and will do so as well.

I think there's money to be earned on easy-to-use tools and development
environments built on top of Uptick that make creating and testing
trading systems easy. 

I think Uptick should execute via FIX. A "personal" FIX server that acts
as an exchange simulator could be open-source. A production version with
pluggable real-time execution adapters could be sold for profit. 

Real-time execution adapters that plug into the FIX server could be sold
for profit as well. Developers could earn money from sales of their
adapters and this should encourage people to build lots of adapters quickly. 

Would you suggest Java or .NET for implementation?

What do you think about this initiative?

    Thanks, Joel