Re: Porting SWARM to JAVA or C++

[Christoph Schlumpf]

>Christoph Schlumpf-
>
>Thank you for your prompt response.  I appreciate
>being exposed to a dialogue that is taking place
>about the future of the SWARM project.
>
>I don't know if you can help me; but, I'll ask
>nonetheless... what sort of timeline do you see
>for the future of SWARM?  What do you consider the
>odds that SWARM will be migrated to JAVA to be?
>Realistically, when do you believe it will be
>completed by?  Could I migrate it myself?  Could I
>migrate it with a small team?  How long would you
>anticipate the migration to take for a highly
>proficient JAVA programmer, a solid C/C++
>programmer, but someone unacquainted with
>Objective C, like myself?
>
>I am trying to make a decision this week as to
>whether or not I will invest a significant amount
>of time exploring SWARM for some honors research
>that I am doing at Stanford.  So, again, all
>information is greatly appreciated... at your
>convenience.
>
>Cheers,
>Michael

Dear Michael,

Sorry but I think I can't help you much. I am not a member of the
swarm-team. You should adress questions concerning the timeline of the
future of swarm to them. You surely saw the response to my mail on the
swarm-support mailing list. As you see, the amount of time (1.5 programmers
all the time since the project started) and money to do swarm is
considerable. To do swarm in java will cost you about the same time and
money they needed. If you want to have a java version of swarm you have to
do it by yourself. But consider that you'll loose the possibility to
interact with other swarm users on the level of the actual implementation
of models. Also consider that there is still a great amount of work going
into the improvement of the present version of swarm.

I suggest that you invest a considerable amount of time exploring SWARM. I
think there is not much around which has the same potential like swarm for
doing time-based multi-agent simulations. To swich from JAVA or C++ to ObjC
is by far more easy than reinventing SWARM in an other language.

I think to have swarm in java would be a great add to the swarm-community.
Java is in some respect easier to program, prevents you from some severe
bugs you can produce with other languages and it's crossplatform. But is
this worth a porting??

If you want to do the port, get familiar with the action system (time based
message calling) of swarm and read the documentation of the "Reflections
API" of the Java JDK 1.1 system. I think to implement some sort of
messaging system like the one in swarm should be possible. I would start
with a very simple action-schedule system which should be implementable in
one to three month by a good java programmer. But to implement the whole
swarm system will need *much* more time. Remember also that you can only
start implementing the Java swarm at the end of this year when the
Reflections API will be avaiable.

I myself am interested in having a simple version of swarm in java because
I want to produce some little agent-based models which I can distribute to
a nonscientific and socialscientific community wich doesn't have much
expierience with computers but are able to start a WWW browser. If you
really plan to port some ideas of swarm to java i'd like to hear about it.
I don't have much free time but I could exchange some ideas with you.

Best regards,
Christoph