You fuse these two services and what you get is a pure free API which lets you access near-realtime stock quotes! You may use this YQL console as a starting point …and here’s how the output looks like in JSON …and here’s how it looks like in XML:

Hope this helps developers like me who may not have enterprise level access to expensive data, but have the will to create cool apps given this access.

Please note that SMD API is currently released as Beta and is quite unstable in nature. I am still experimenting with everything from the domain name of this service (smdapi.co.cc which is a temperory one) to the API structure itself. I am also very much open to ideas which I can incorporate in this project before it officially released.

Update: The API is currently no more supported in interest of this method I lately discovered. Please contact me at akshay[dot]raje[at]gmail.com if you need any help / consulting in this regard.

The plugin API will provides a simple shortcode. For example – [wpws_market_data market="nse" symbol="acc" datatype="last"] or [wpws_market_data market="nasdaq" symbol="csco" datatype="open"]. NSE data is currently scraped from nseindia.com and NASDAQ data is scraped from reuters.com. The immediate plan is to implement all major stock markets in this API. Later, I plan to extend this modular architecture to other categories of scraps such as Weather, Sports scores etc too.

The plugin API will provide a shortcode something like this – [wpws mod="nse" symbol="acc" datatype="last"] should output the latest price for ACC listed at NSE. The aim is to make it an extendable module framework and hence I am taking time to code it well. Apart from this features, I am also planning to improve the core scrapper with functionalities like a regex powered cleanup function to remove all unwanted text strings from the scrap and also a more flexible algorithm to query html tables returned by the scrap.

Data source: Currently I am considering to scrap the stock exchange website pages using cURL and then parsing the DOM structure of the raw source. Once the service grows big enough, a subscription to an official data feed can be considered.

Output formats: I realized that RSS was a bad idea after all, however I discovered a very evolved XML specification for market data representation called Market Data Definition Language (MDDL). Apart from MDDL the other output formats could be a simpler XML (home grown format); good old csv (light, easy and time tested) and JSON (for direct use in client side apps). As JSONP is natively cross domain, it can be easily integrated without any server side technology. This means that users of this service can start their own ‘Get Quote’ apps on their website irrespective of the server or the host they use… just plain javascript code.

Lets get down to an example here. This is the current get quote output from NSE (exchange) for ACC (stock). An example output in MDDL would look like this sample mddl-xml. This as such is the plan and I am eagerly awaiting some feedback on this one before I start off with the actual code.

But the reality is that our stock markets won’t do it. Not at least so soon. To fill in this gap I am planning to start a service which will parse BSE or NSE pages and convert them into RSS, XML or JSON feeds. It will be a simple HTTP service which will answer your request in the desired format. I will start work as soon I find a some time off my current projects. Till then, give it a thought and let me know what do you think of this.