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Sustaining Members’ News

Sustaining Members, British APL Association

Vector 23:4, page 19

implementations APL community

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the article’s own PDF Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 19

Dyalog Ltd

Dyalog Version 12.0.3 has been released:

  • 32-bit Classic for Windows and AIX
  • 32-bit and 64-bit Unicode for Windows and Linux

The main new features are secure socket communications for Conga, ⎕FCOPY, and two new workspaces.

APLIN
imports mainframe APL2 workspaces exported via the )OUT command

APL2PCIN
imports PC APL2 or APL+Win workspaces exported via the )OUT command

Manuals for Version 12 are now available from Lulu.com, either printed to order, or as freely downloadable PDFs.

2008 conference programme

The Dyalog 2008 conference will be held at LO-skolen in Elsinore in October. Some highlights from the conference programme:

  • Demo of an ASP.NET application with a Dyalog engine Chris “Ziggi” Paul, The Childcare Company. The LASER application is an online training tool for teaching NVQ levels 2, 3 and 4 to nursery staff. The system as an ASP.NET front end with Macromedia Flash plug-ins but is controlled and managed by a Dyalog APL.Net program.

  • Airline Revenue Management Maurice Jordan. Airlines believe good Revenue Management enhances revenue by 5% or more. In an industry that struggles to return profits of even this magnitude, it has spawned a small army of consultants and its own mythology. The presentation will show a simple APL approach to “classical” revenue management. The underlying model for this classical formulation relies on the traditional complexity of airline fares, where very few people can navigate the range of fares on offer. Internet selling blows a hole in this model. The presentation will show how dynamic programming (sorry, nothing to do with d-fns) indicates that a simple modification to the input data allows the original algorithm to be used in this new marketplace. There are parallels in Financial Services and many other industries where there is a fixed resource to be allocated to products offering different levels of return (and risk).

  • Genetic Algorithms Romilly Cocking. Romilly has been interested in biology-based Artificial Intelligence since the 1970s. He’s recently started to follow up on his early AI research. After great frustration using Python and Java, he’s now using APL again.

  • Heterogeneous development with maximum re-use of APL assets Lars Stampe Villadsen & Martin Petri, SimCorp. The existing SimCorp Dimension APL codebase is huge so it is important that as much as possible can be re-used while using new features provided by .NET/C#. This presentation will make a live demo on how development in APL and C# can be done in parallel by adding features to existing core functionality while maintaining the integrity of the system as a whole.

  • OO for the elderly Dick Bowman. This presentation will explore Dyalog’s object-oriented features through a back door, following a path taken by one elderly APL bigot – it may interest others who have a similar background, or newcomers wanting to make fullest use of APL’s functionality.

  • Gridifying FinE using the Techila Grid Claus Madsen, FinE. FinE is a comprehensive set of advanced financial functions covering all aspects of risk management, valuation and analysis. FinE is a developer’s toolkit; the core is shipped as a DLL. The purpose of this presentation is to show a practical and real-life embedding of the Techila Grid Technology into a financial commercial product.

  • PKZIP your files using APL and .NET Gianluigi Quario, APL Italiana. ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Dll is a .NET compression library that supports Zip files using PKZIP 2.0 style encryption, with GNU long filename extensions. It is written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. It is implemented as an assembly, and can thus easily be incorporated into other projects (in any .NET language). Two Dyalog APL functions are presented that create and use objects that are instances of .NET Classes derived from this library and other .NET base libraries. These functions allow the compression and deflation of Zip files.

  • ADOC Kai Jaeger, APLTeam Ltd. With the introduction of OO in Dyalog Version 11, implementation details of a class remain hidden. The user of a class needs to know about and deal with only the public interface of a class. ADOC is a self-contained class designed to extract and report information about the public interface. ADOC is able to report public methods, fields and properties of any class, by request with detailed syntax information. But ADOC can do more than that: following a small set of simple rules one can put fully-fledged documentation into a class. ADOC is able to extract these pieces of information and create either an HTML report or an XML file from that.

  • Herding cats for fun and profit Joakim Hårsman, Profdoc Care. Profdoc is a leading provider of healthcare information technology. Profdoc Care makes Profdoc HIS – a medical record system, and has grown from two to 13 APL developers in just a couple of years. Joakim was there for the ride and will talk about what had to change as the numbers of programmers grew, and how development at Profdoc Care works today. Joakim will address the following issues: why the idea that it’s impossible to recruit APLers is nonsense; what changed as we got bigger; how to handle a ten year old code base weighing in at more than 300 000 lines, and remain nimble; the importance of tools, and the ones used at Profdoc.

  • Performance improvements in Dyalog Roger Hui, Jsoftware, Inc. In the next version of Dyalog, some common boolean functions will be improved by factors ranging from 2 to 1600. We work through one particular example.

  • Serving lunch with Dyalog Tommy Johannessen, Jersie Data ApS. The application is used by 25,000 school children and their parents for ordering and payment of school lunches. The lunches are produced in 25 kitchens located all over Denmark. Each kitchen has its own set-up and menu, and the application caters for the design, creation and running of individual kitchen websites. The presentation will focus on how this success story started and demo the various aspects of the application. The technical aspects will focus on how we created the .aspx files, the file structure, backup procedures, communication between the servers and the call structure.

  • The Array Constraint Engine Gert L. Møller, Array Technology. Array Technology provides technology for solving complex constraint problems in real-time on a very small memory footprint. The technology is used in a range of business applications, e.g. for product configuration with many business rules or constraints. The key to the performance of the technology is the use of nested arrays (array-based logic) for handling logical constraints with a multitude of combinations. Dyalog 8.2 was used for prototyping the first version of the technology, but Gert will present how the next generation of the technology will benefit from the power of the latest Dyalog releases.

  • Snooping with APL Charles H. Brenner, Ph.D., Consulting in Forensic Mathematics. Charles is a world-recognised authority in Forensic Mathematics – covering complex areas such as DNA identification, biostatistics, and population genetics. His DNA•VIEW™ APL-based software solution is the acknowledged leader and is the standard worldwide for DNA identification. The software has been used in countless cases amongst others the World Trade Center victim-identification work, Tsunami victim identification in Thailand, mass identification projects including desaparacito children from El Salvador, and war victims in Bosnia.

  • COPA-MS – A look under the hood Michael Baas, DLS-Planung.de. Comanufacturing Management System (COPA-MS) is an application based on the Hologram BI-System from Dyalog’s Australian distributor Hologram Pty Ltd. Last year, this project was mentioned in Michael Baas’ & John Miller’s talk on networking as the first fruit of the collaboration between Hologram and Dynamic Logistics Systems GmbH.

  • OOStats – Performing statistical calculations using Dyalog Alan Sykes, Acadvent Ltd. The advent of the object-oriented features in recent Dyalog Interpreters provides a new and exciting framework within which to construct software to analyse data. The talk will demonstrate statistical objects that allow an APL user to perform statistical calculations on realistic data sets that may well contain missing values. All statistical functionality is made available either directly from user commands from the session, or, for more speedy data exploration sessions where a variety of alternative analyses might be envisaged, by using a menu-driven GUI version.

  • Pocket APL Ray Cannon. Notes on developing a system that runs under Dyalog PocketAPL, with two example applications (GPS and Su-Doku), and some utilities making ⎕NA calls to the underlying operating system.

The conference will be bracketed by training days, plus a couple of workshops on the Tuesday:

  • Sharpening Your APL Knife Kai Jaeger
  • Source Code Management using SALT and SubVersion Dan Baronet
  • Migrating to Unicode Morten Kromberg
  • Fast-track your GUI Design Adrian Smith
  • Using the Microsoft .Net Framework John Daintree
  • Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming Daniel Baronet
  • Web Creole Stephen Taylor
  • Conga & SSL Morten Kromberg
  • RainPro Adrian Smith

Hologram

Dyalog has appointed Hologram Pty Ltd as a new distributor for Australia and New Zealand.

Hologram Pty Ltd is an Australian Business Intelligence company founded in 2004 to develop and deliver future-proofed Business Performance Management solutions. Hologram’s founders have an extensive track record as developers of highly successful treasury risk-management and financial-reporting software packages.

Hologram’s attention to detail, meticulous programming skills and ability to solve the most complex mathematical problems are invisible to end users, who benefit from ease of use, point-and-click drill down, and instant access to real-time modelling and reporting from enterprise systems.

The company has a strong focus on manufacturing and financial institutions, with customers including leading beverage companies, credit unions, merchant banks and leasing companies.

In connection with the appointment, Managing Director Gitte Christensen says, “I am absolutely delighted that Dyalog is partnering with Hologram. The company’s extensive experience in array language development and applications in the finance, banking and treasury industries makes it a natural and easy fit with Dyalog.”

Hologram’s business focus includes high-performance, real-time transaction-monitoring and data-information systems. The company’s principals have an established track record of working with banks, exchanges and credit unions in development and consultancy in areas such as treasury systems, anti money laundering, risk management, compliance reporting, portfolio management and trading systems. They have worked with institutions around the world including the Bank of South Australia and Société Générale, as well as the stock exchanges of Singapore, Indonesia, Istanbul and Oslo.