bookedblocks

A Terminal User Iterface (TUI) for visualizing Kraken's order book using its WebSocket API.

demo

Quick start

This project is a pure Rust project and conforms to the classic cargo build system:

cargo build # for building the project
cargo run -- Ticker/Pair # for running the executable
cargo test # for running unittesting

Ideas

bookedblocks is an asynchronous application where separation of concerns is hopefully enforced through the separation of threads:

• A main dispatcher thread serves to orchestrate different parts of the application together. This is the first thread that gets launched in the entrypoint.
• A data thread takes care of keeping the websocket connection alive and appending to an internal cache.
• Pipeline threads process the cached data and prepares it for updating the UI.
• A UI thread renders the data and runs the screen update loop.

Technology stack

The various capabilities of the application are based on different open source technologies:

• tokio: for the asynchronous runtime and managing threads
• ratatui: as a TUI library for handling rendering data to the screen
• kraken_async_rs: for facilitating websocket connections to the Kraken API

UI

The UI has very simple ambitions. When running, the application pull data from the Kraken API in the backgrounf and shows 4 elements for the selected ticker:

• Order Map: A main central heat map with time on the x axis and price on the y axis. Volume is encoded through color intensity.
• Order Volumes: A projection onto the time axis of the heat map reading as booked volume over time.
• Depth: A projection onto the price axis reading as current market depth.
• A snapshot of the current status using the ticker information.