A programming progect of mine requires a stream of stock prices for various stocks. Does anyone know if such a service exists online? Cheap/free services would be preferable, as I’m pretty broke.
There are plenty of free stock quote services that use SOAP. There is a good one here, at Xmethods.net.
I don’t know how familiar you are with SOAP, but it’s pretty easy to write a client for this service using Perl, PHP, Java, or whatever you need. The only caveat is that SOAP services (especially free ones like this) tend to be a little slow. You’d probably see a lag of 4 or 5 seconds to get the information.