Topic: Java

In all honesty if I was starting again I think I'd go for a compiled statically-typed language like Java or C#. I never have the discipline to do full unit testing on my PHP/Python bots, and end up fixing bugs in live that a compiler would have caught straight away.

Although PHP and Python do have the advantage of running on really cheap shared servers - not sure .NET or a JVM is so readily available at the cheap end of the hosting/VPS market?

Python is IMHO the way to go.

Which SOAP library do you use in Python, if you don't mind me asking? Or do you roll your own XML?

Currently I'm using PHP5 for all my BF API stuff, even for algorithms where the number crunching is in Python. I'm interested in using more Python, but it doesn't seem obvious what approach to take. I've been looking at SOAPpy, but it's no longer maintained, doesn't even build under Python 2.5 without some frigging around, and relies on other libraries that are also unmaintained (PyXML). So I'm not exactly getting a warm feeling about it. ;-)

I've played with a bit of Java but it didn't really excite me too much. And neither did any of the .Net languages. So i'm still plugging along with my Visual Basic 6 bots which i compile to stand-alone exe's with a nice, but simple, GUI. To be honest, the Java/MS.Net IDE's were surprisingly slow and i tried both Netbeans and Eclipse for Java. By the time they've loaded the framework (or whatever it is they do on startup), i've run my VB6 program, debugged it and moved onto the next function.

I know nothing of Python, but i hear it's simple to learn and when i did some research, i found several tools that can compile Python code to byte code executables. Also found the same kind of thing for PHP, but i'm so familiar with VB6, and it does exactly what i want, so quite frankly i haven't looked into learning another language.

Let's face it ... any language that allows you to access the API & do a bit of addition and subtraction will allow you to write a bot...

Well that's certainly the truth austin, though accessing the API is the trickiest bit to get working with most languages.

Probably ... with Java you have a few options. Axis (http://ws.apache.org/axis2/) and CXF (http://cxf.apache.org/) are both very straight forward to get going with ...

lol ... oops what have I done ... yes it's genuine information ... might be the last useful thing I post though ... ;)

The Netbeans IDE (V6+) allows you to add a web service and the setup wizard asks for a WSDL and then generates all your classes for you, just like .Net. The API was dead easy to setup, however the free API is a pain in the ass because you've gotta setup time checks in every function to make sure you don't exceed the throttle. If they just put everything on a 1 or 2 sec delay, the whole thing would be a LOT more appealing. So i just carried on scraping, i find it easier to work with and there are quite a few bonuses such as being able to get form figures which aren't available via API.

I use java and python, but run my analysis and plotting using python and trading with java. They're both really neat languages.

matplotlib, numpy and scipy give a lot of plotting and statistical functions for python and pydev gives you a neat coding/debugger in eclipse. If I'd seen your python/betfair examples 6 months ago I'd probably be using python for trading too.