How would I go about plotting "live" stock market data with Processing, jQuery, Pure Data or Max/MSP?

Question

This is intended as a question quite open to any suggestions, hints or pointers. I wish to start playing around with home brewed automated investment models, the beginnings of which I have concepts for. I'm familiar with a few frameworks/languages that I suspect might be able to help me in this. Suggestions regarding other languages than those specified are also welcome.

I might be able to query XML data from Google or Yahoo finance APIs? Not overly familiar with XML. Where would I find the relevant tutorials or information on XML to achieve this purpose?

Also, is there a way to make searches through a large set of "current" stock data (current value of many stocks) for certain specified conditions?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I'm finding processing easy to use. Check out http://processing.org/reference/XMLElement.html for reading xml.

Answer 2

If you are not too familiar with XML a great place to start learning about it would be this article.

Other than that, have you started this project or are you still planning?

My suggestion would be to sit down and write out the individual steps your program would need to perform. Obviously if you are not familiar with XML and/or AJAX then you probably will not think of everything. But at least you would have formed a general road map.

Additionally, this SO question may help you get started.

Answer 3

For Pure Data, you would probably need something like IEM xmlrpc (which is included in Pd-extended) or PuRest JSON to receive the data.