Reviews

Briefing: JMSL Numerical Library 3.0

• By Mike Gunderloy
• December 20, 2004

JMSL Numerical Library 3.0
$3,495 for one floating dev seat
Visual Numerics, Inc.
San Ramon, California
925-415-8300
www.vni.com

A few months ago I wrote about Visual Numerics and the release of their numerical library for .NET applications. Now they're out with release 3.0 of the Java version of their library, and once again it's a very spiffy package. If you're doing any sort of heavy number-crunching (whether scientific, business, or otherwise), you should take a look at the various Visual Numerics offerings.

Like their other products, JMSL is 100% native language code - in this case, 100% Java(TM). That makes it easy to integrate it with your other Java code, and means that you can use the same tools to work with the library code that you use with everything else.

JMSL offers an immense selection of mathematical, statistical, financial, and charting classes, together with extensive documentation and sample code. As a 3.0 product, you'd expect some new features, and you'd be right. This version includes:

• A robust neural network implementation
• Some additional regression modeling and forecasting algorithms
• Hierarchical cluster analysis for finding groupings in your data
• "Heat Map" charts - these can be used to show three types of information at once by combining two dimensions plus a color. They have a nifty demo of packing hourly temperature measurements for an entire year into a single heat map.

In addition to emphasizing the company's commitment to providing native language versions across a wide variety of platforms, JMSL 3.0 also showcases some new boundaries. There is specific functionality here for bioinformatics researchers, and of course the ability to easily set up complex neural net processing will be a boon to anyone doing complex forecasting. So even though there are some old classic algorithms here, there are also new frontiers to explore. Plus as a .NET person I enjoy this as a probable preview of some things we might see in the next C# library (though that's just speculation on my part).

If you'd like to know more, you can view online demos or get an evaluation copy of the software by filling out the appropriate forms at the Visual Numerics Web site.