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I've been working for about 5 years in Java, developing financial back-offices (web-services, business logic, report generation etc.).

I think Mathematica is very suitable for such calculations and business logic development and am wondering if there are any success stories for its usage in such systems.

I also think that it can be pretty to use Mathematica with JLink in my web-application to delegate calculations.

  • Does anyone have such an experience or know-how ?

UPD 1: Removed some questions (they have relation to Wolfram Workbench):

What about unit-testing in Mathematica ? How to organize Mathematica code if it would be very large ?

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  • $\begingroup$ You can use JLink to call Mathematica from Java. WebMathematica uses that, and JSP, and is a web app, which you can deploy on any J2EE compliant application server, e.g. Apache Tomcat. It isn't free, but it contains a lot of useful features already implemented. If you have an access to it, there are examples coming with it, which can get you started. As to the ways to organize code, you can look at some good examples in Mathematica distribution to see how it's done, e.g. various links in SystemFiles/Links. I personally also use a number of meta-programming techniques to help me with that. $\endgroup$
    – Leonid Shifrin
    Apr 25, 2012 at 10:58
  • $\begingroup$ You'll have to break down your question... there are 3 hidden questions in there. 1) Success stories/applications of Mathematica in financian back-ends 2) Unit testing in Mathematica and 3) Code organization in large code bases. I strongly suggest that you keep only the first question here and split the other two into separate questions of their own $\endgroup$
    – rm -rf ♦
    Apr 25, 2012 at 11:22
  • $\begingroup$ I updated my answer to direct you to a post that shows how unit testing can be done from within Mathematica. $\endgroup$
    – user21
    Apr 25, 2012 at 12:11

3 Answers 3

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Here are a few pointers. For question 1 you can find information, for example here and here. There are some user stories on that page. Other companies/products in that area (and there are many more) are for example UnRisk or RapidBusinessModeling.

Concerning point 2, yes unit testing is available via Wolfram Workbench UnitTesting. In fact most of Mathematica's unit tests are done with this. To run unit tests outside of Workbench have a look here.

Concerning point 3, a large extend of Mathematica is written in Mathematica. More that 1MLOC can be managed with WolframWorkbench, no sweat. Concerning organization, a Mathematica Package is a unit which collects functionality in it's own context (name space).

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    $\begingroup$ All the functionality of WolframWorkbench, including UnitTest and webMathematica, is also available through a plugin for the generic Eclipse. $\endgroup$
    – b.gates.you.know.what
    Apr 25, 2012 at 10:48
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    $\begingroup$ @LeonidShifrin, brevity is my friend... or should I call it laziness ;-) $\endgroup$
    – user21
    Apr 25, 2012 at 11:02
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    $\begingroup$ Laziness is the driving force of our progress :). As for the brevity, you set a very good standard, I should learn from you. $\endgroup$
    – Leonid Shifrin
    Apr 25, 2012 at 11:06
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    $\begingroup$ One comment to add: packages do not have to be contained to one file, and are similar in that respect to c++ namespaces. A good example is the Histograms` package which is spread across 4 different files, not counting either PacletInfo.m and Kernel/info.m. $\endgroup$
    – rcollyer
    Apr 25, 2012 at 15:12
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    $\begingroup$ I wasn't trying to imply that your answer suggested that at all. But, the package idea does seem to encourage the mindset that they are restricted to one file, and until recently I was under the same impression (without testing it of course). So, it was just extra info. $\endgroup$
    – rcollyer
    Apr 25, 2012 at 15:41
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For your first question you can look at the customer stories in finance and analytics.

You might also be interested in the recordings from the Wolfram Finance Platform virtual workshop.

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The question is a little broad. In my shop, we routinely use Mathematica for risk analysis and portfolio reporting, also for hypothesis testing and a variety of other front-office tasks. We have a master library of functions that we have created for these purposes over the last six years or so, and we also created the MathematicaLinkToBloomberg package that is (as of 2016) available at Github and elsewhere.

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  • $\begingroup$ The link is broked. $\endgroup$
    – Murta
    Feb 26, 2013 at 3:01
  • $\begingroup$ Huh. It still works in V9. Wolfram may have pulled it off their website now that they have their own solution (for $10,000 per license). Do you need a copy of my tool? $\endgroup$
    – Michael Stern
    Feb 26, 2013 at 3:05
  • $\begingroup$ I would like to know it. Do you have another link? Or some github? Tks $\endgroup$
    – Murta
    Feb 26, 2013 at 3:08
  • $\begingroup$ I don't know how to github, but I put it online here: wheels.org/monkeywrench/?p=737 Enjoy! $\endgroup$
    – Michael Stern
    Feb 26, 2013 at 14:46
  • $\begingroup$ So! You are the monkeywrench site guy! Nice good surprise. Tks for share it. $\endgroup$
    – Murta
    Mar 2, 2013 at 14:04

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