Java trial control software

[gnujosh]

I am looking to develop a Java application which allows the biologists in our lab to design certain experimental paradigms which require the song playing capability of Cheetah. This is essentially replicating some of the functionality of the Trial Control software on your website, but with a different interface.

The Trial Control software connects to Cheetah using NetCom, but the NetCom development package contains example code that seems to frequently make use of dlls. I am interested in using Java to connect to Cheetah, but I don't know the correct protocols for communicating with Cheetah.

From NetComClient.h, I see that port 26100 is used to connect to Cheetah, but I'm not sure whether it is TCP or UDP or what the packets should look like for connecting or sending commands or events. Is this information available somewhere? I would be happy to allow any of the Java code I write to be included in future NetCom development packages.

Of course, I can just write a Java front end to create the .cfg file that can then be opened by the Trial Control software, but this is an approach I would like to take only as a last resort.

Thanks for any help,
Josh

[bruth]

If you can explain what changes you need to make to the Trial Control interface, we may be able to construct a solution from existing control programs.

Although we do not have a Java wrapper for any of these libraries/DLLs, you can use the DLL that is part of the Matlab implementation (as it is just a basic C DLL) through the Java Native Interface (JNI.) We currently support C/C++, .NET 1.1 and 2.0 - 3.0, and Matlab all on 32-bit Windows only.

While we appreciate the offer to create a native Java implementation, we are not looking for a Java version of NetCom at this time. If more interest is shown in a Java port of NetCom, we will definitely look into creating one.

If you have any more ideas or requests, don't hesitate to let us know.