Yodlee now has well over 200 Developers registered within Yodlee MoneyCenter. The community is growing fast. Many Yodlee FinApps are in the certification stage and will be released to market soon. The Yodlee FinApp Store website was recently updated giving you more information on how to build and certify a Yodlee FinApp and it provides some sample REST APIs that you can leverage. Check it out http://www.finappstore.com/specs.html If you have any questions please give us a shout at developer@yodlee.com.
Yodlee FinApp Store Blog
Build and Distribute Applications for Financial Services
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Yodlee FinApp Store
Howard, Good questions. Let’s start with the second question: Yodlee is using the FinApp platform’s OAuth and REST API’s to allow established mobile development companies to build native applications for devices like iPad, Android, BlackBerry. One company, TouMetis, demoed a version of mobile PFM at Finovate running on the Yodlee platform and will be launching it in 2011.
Now for your first question – and a longer answer – here is why Yodlee choose to go with FLEX:
Yodlee® FinApps in Adobe® Flex® Framework When designing the Yodlee 10x Platform, Yodlee product management and technology engaged in a research initiative to determine the correct technologies to be used in each portion of the Yodlee platform to create the best possible Yodlee 10x experience.
One of the most visible decisions is the use of the Adobe Flex framework as the user interface portion of the platform inside of the Yodlee MoneyCenterTM application (which includes Yodlee PersonalFinance, Yodlee BillPay and all other Yodlee products).
Rich Internet Application (RIA)
Consumers using Yodlee products value a rich and engaging experience and look for continued innovation and features. Yodlee first introduced Flash for visualization of charting and received extremely positive feedback from the consumer base about the style of the display. The Adobe Flex platform is designed with elegant controls and components that can easily create simple experiences and the robustness to create fully interactive experiences. Managing your finances involves graphs, charts and other distinct visualizations of complex data. Adobe Flex provides the power and tools to render this type of information in a straightforward way.
Consistent Experience
Writing in pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript is not consistent between different browsers. Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and others all have slight variations in how their rendering logic and their JavaScript engines interpret client- side code. This leads to extremely complex coding and testing to ensure a consistent and working UI across a divergent group of platforms. The Adobe Flash player is the most widely installed browser plug-in on the internet and is supported by all major browsers. Current statistics shows that Flash is installed on 97.5% of all desktop computers in mature internet markets1.
Package and Deployment
Yodlee FinApps need to be easily packaged into a distributable bundle that FinApp developers can load upload into Yodlee and that Yodlee can distribute to all of its deployments as well as distribute into online banking systems not hosted by Yodlee and into portal or social network sites that have no direct connection to the Yodlee platform or online banking. This package needs to be contained and not conflict with styles or scripts of the supporting page.
Open Platform and Mature Toolset
The Adobe Flex framework leverages a free platform and SDK that can be integrated into various development environments and build scripts. The development environment runs on both Microsoft and Apple operations systems. In additional Adobe sells its own IDE called Flash BuilderTM that is built on top of the Eclipse IDE. This toolset has been used by Flex developers since 20042 and is in its fourth major release.