FDC3 Desktop Agent Bridge — Reference Implementation
Built the reference test harness that proved the FDC3 Desktop Agent Bridge protocol works end to end.
Senior Software / Solutions Engineer · Jan 2023 – Sep 2023
Overview
FDC3 is the open standard for how financial desktop applications interoperate, and the Desktop Agent Bridge (DAB) protocol extends that to let separate interoperability platforms talk to each other. I co-authored the DAB specification, but a new protocol on paper isn't proof it works: there were no clients, no bridge, and no practical way to run multiple Finsemble instances on one desktop to test against each other.
My Role & Approach
I built a mock Desktop Agent Bridge and a set of mock client agents to exercise the protocol end to end, taking a pragmatic, test-driven approach and implementing one message and handler at a time. Beyond the happy path, the harness had to cover the conditions that actually break bridges in practice: slow networks, agents that respond slowly, and agents that don't respond at all or return errors. Around the same time, another team was independently building Finsemble's own production support for multi-agent bridging, which gave me a real, independently built implementation to test my mock bridge against, not just self-consistent mocks.
Outcome
The result was a fully working set of mock Desktop Agents and a bridge that proved the DAB concept, validated against another team's independent real-world implementation rather than mocks testing only themselves.
Tech Stack
Interested in something similar?
Let's talk