The biggest problem I had when learning to program my own trading strategies in JForex is finding where to start learning. There were few JForex documentation available at the time and I had to teach myself through painstaking trial and error with the help of Dukascopy's technical support. Things have certainly changed for the better as a JForex community is starting to sprout and documentation for it is at least sufficient to get anyone started. This post is the first of a series of quick beginner's guide to learning JForex programming by putting all these resources in a tutorial.
JForex is a Java tool
JForex is actually not a programming language. It is an application programming interface (API) for use with the standard Java programming language. As such, the first step to learning to program in JForex is to learn Java. Luckily, Java is one of the most popular programming languages. So there're plenty of resources on and off the web to learn Java programming. Some examples of free online tutorials are:
- The Java Tutorials -- This is an official tutorial from the developer of Java themselves. Highly recommended.
- Beginners Java Tutorial -- More geared for the absolute beginners to programming.
If you prefer a book, I would recommend Head First Java, 2nd Edition. I brushed up on my Java from this book. Don't dwell on Java too much though as you only need to know the basics to get started with JForex. Just read a few chapters to understand the Java syntax and then move on. You can always refer back to them later.
Diving into JForex
The JForex Wiki is one of the three essential resources for JForex programmers. I will be referring to some specific pages of the Wiki in much of this series of posts. If you haven't done so already, signup for a DEMO account at Dukascopy. Then launch the JForex platform and follow the instructions on the Use in JForex wiki page to assemble your first JForex strategy!
Summary
So far so good? By this point, I hope you can understand basic Java source code and know how to start/open, compile, and run a JForex strategy. In the next post in this learning JForex series, we will study the anatomy of a JForex strategy.