Romain Guy's Blog

Unexpected Java Tool

When I'm home and need to tweak and plot an equation, I use an excellent tool that ships with MacOS X 10.4, Grapher. Easy to use, it fits my purpose and provides a good user experience:

As I don't want to carry both my laptops to the office every day, I bring only my Windows box, on which I have yet to find a tool to replace Grapher. I have tried several tools and none convinced me yet. Nevertheless, I decided to give Maple 10 a try. I learned how to use Maple a few years ago at school and I was wondering what new stuff it could offer. Well, first of all, it seems to be written mostly in Java (at leat the whole UI is). The UI is also much easier for newcomers and now provides completion, context sensitive menus, and so forth. But that's not my point. Maple proved to be a valuable Java development tool.

It turns out Maple offers a language translation feature that can turn calculations, equations and even "Maple script" procedures into another language. Among the available targets are C, FORTRAN, MATLAB, Visual Basic and... Java. Take this example for instance:

To use this equation in my Java source code I can just right click on it and go to the Language Conversion menu:

And here is the result:

I'll grand you this feature is not the best one I have ever seen to boost my productivity but it's sure really handy, especially when you don't want to mess up parenthesis and other weird mathematical stuff. You can also optimize the computation and then generate the code:

This version makes it easier to break the computation into several methods which can be very useful when you know some parts won't change at runtime. I was happily surprised to find a good Java asset with Maple :)

Comments

• Looks like a nice tool. Too bad I suck at math.
  

  Posted by: rabbe on October 11, 2005 at 05:16 AM

• Whow, THIS is what I need. I'm the ultimate jerk when it comes to implementing math into applications. this would help me so much!
  Thanks dude!

  Posted by: poppleton on October 11, 2005 at 07:35 AM

• Your RSS feed for this says While looking for an efficient graping tool for Windows, I discovered a very interesting feature of Matlab

  When I googled "graping", its first response was Did you mean: graphing

  So did you?

  Posted by: brucechapman on October 11, 2005 at 05:46 PM

• Hi Romain,

  there was a session about Maple at the last JavaOne.
  The session number is TS-2623. You can download the PDF of
  the session from the JavaOne's homepage.

  Best regards,
  Andrej Golovnin

  Posted by: golovnin on October 12, 2005 at 01:30 AM

• Thanks for the tip, I will definitely take a look (and if you like my demos you'll find my session PDF on the same web page :)

  Posted by: gfx on October 12, 2005 at 01:44 AM

• The Maple session at JavaOne was pretty good. It adressed client architectural challenges that arises when building large applications. I was quite happy to get our own architecture "verified" through the Maple application solutions.

  Posted by: hkverneland on October 12, 2005 at 03:54 AM

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