Do you have any examples in programming languages apart from Perl?

Question

Is there a more modern programming language than Perl that has some examples to do the same thing as the programs in Automatic Exchange Betting?

Answer 1

Automatic Exchange Betting uses Perl because Perl is quite easy to understand as 'pseudo code' providing it is written in full and uses appropriate variable names.  Perl is also very fast for a scripting language and has the most comprehensive set of add on modules available.

Due to the simplicity of the code, a number of folk have used the code in Automatic Exchange Betting to implement similar code in other languages.

By the same token, an R package is just about to released in May by Betwise which will implement a full API library of functions for use with the popular R language.  Meantime, you can download R here:  http://cran.r-project.org/ - we will announce the release of the R package within the next few weeks.

Answer 2

There is a very good 'tutorial' thread in the Betfair Developers forum for implementing a basic Betfair API solution in MS Visual Studio (VS). It includes a number of beginner-fiendly code snippets in VB. Link is here:

http://forum.bdp.betfair.com/showthread.php?t=112

I used quite a few bits of the code here to get myself started, armed with the strategic overview from Automatic Exchange Betting.

You'll need to download and install the MySQL Visual Studio add-on in order to connect to the Smartform database from this programming environment, but that's pretty straightforward. The add-on itself is a largely self-documenting piece of .NET

On the wider issue of choosing between Perl and a tool like VS, the latter is proprietary and will therefore involve a cost (I bought the Student edition at about ninety quid), so that's an obvious downside. But I'm a self-taught hobbyist programmer whose limited meaningful experience has been confined to VB and SQL - and even that has all been standalone PC stuff with no web service or API work at all. For an amateur like me, VS is a forgiving place to work, and it has the significant advantage of automating a lot of the hardcore technical stuff involved in interacting with an API. VS also allowed me to work in a programming language (VB) that I had some grasp of, and it was a relief not to have to learn Perl at the same time as all the other New Stuff involved in building a Bot.

Everyone has their own preferences of course, but VS has worked fine for me.