When at work, I’m generally in the worlds of Windows and Solaris. But these days I’m doing my home development work on a MacBook Pro. But I’m keen to make sure that I can do everything that I do at work so that I can experiment in my own time. So here’s a list of the software I use to develop on the Mac and where to get it.
Apr 05
I mentioned my use of the WebLogic Scripting Tool a little while back. I have noticed since then that a number of folks visiting this site are looking for example scripts. I have obviously written a number myself and I promise I’ll try to get around to posting them here. However until I get myself in gear, I thought I would point you at some useful examples that are already out there. I’ll expand this post as I find more…
Since I’m now playing around on a MacBook Pro I thought I’d see whether it was possible to get BEA WebLogic running on it. As it turns out it’s quite simple. These instructions seem to apply to anything from 9.0 upwards, but there’s a link to instructions for 8.1 below.
The financial industry does seem to be loath to share the fruits of their efforts. There doesn’t seem to be a lot around. And certainly not much that is regularly updated. Maybe everyone is worried about sharing trade secrets, but the rules for calculations are well established and I’m guessing that everyone must be writing their own implementations or buying in over-priced modules.
As a developer of financial systems, I’m constantly disappointed by how difficult it is to perform precise decimal arithmetic in Java. It’s fairly common knowledge that the use of double is not much use for financial calculations. As a quick example, take a look at the following piece of code.
public static void main(String arg[]) {
BigDecimal bd = new BigDecimal("58.99").add(new BigDecimal("0.99"));
System.out.println("BigDecimal result: " + bd);
double d = 58.99 + 0.99;
System.out.println("Double result: " + d);
}You would have thought both results should be the same. However, you end up with:
BigDecimal result: 59.98
Double result: 59.980000000000004My dad passed away on April 1st 2005. At the time he had been working on a book, aimed at introducing the Java programming language as part of a university course. The project had taken a long time and was never quite finished, but near the beginning of 2005, he has finished his last chapter. Having dug around on his iBook, I found the most recent Word document in which he had been preparing the book. Reading it through, it was obvious that it would need a good bit of work before it could be publishable. Read more