Dear all, this mail is concerned with Gecode/J and not Gecode.
After some discussion that has been going on for over a year now, we decided that we have to take a decision regarding the future of Gecode/J. To remind you, we started Gecode/J with a very clear focus on teaching: have something that has a graphical search tool (Gist) and that is easily accessible for students. Neither of these aspects are any longer relevant: Gecode comes with a much much better Gist (more functionality) and the little programming that one has to do for modeling turns out to be easier in C++ (due to operator overloading and other reasons) than it is in Java. I, for one, will not use Gecode/J any longer for teaching. I will use Gecode directly or in combination with MiniZinc. Now, throw in the additional disadvantages of Gecode/J compared to Gecode: less documentation (this will get worse as the entry-level documentation under way will be for Gecode and not Gecode/J), way more bugs (we just do not have the resources to test Gecode/J as thoroughly as we test Gecode), and less efficiency. To us it is quite clear that we have to take a decision on Gecode/J. So, Gecode/J is not as good as Gecode and with the amount of resources we can spend on Gecode/J it will never be. Then, we do not want people to believe that the poor quality (well, for Gecode standards) of Gecode/J also means that Gecode itself is of poor quality. This just leads to a lot of aggravation for both users and us (just see the latest exchange of messages on this list about Gecode/J where the tone in some messages has not exactly been very encouraging). Okay, to cut a long story short: we will discontinue the development of Gecode/J. The current version will be available for some time but there will be no Gecode/J 3.0 when Gecode 3.0 is released. In addition to that we are thinking about having a separate mailing list for Gecode/J until it is eventually fully retired. The good news is that Gecode/J has a very liberal license. So if anyone is interested to take over, we'll be more than happy to get you started. All the best Christian, Guido, Mikael -- Christian Schulte, www.ict.kth.se/~cschulte/ _______________________________________________ Gecode users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.gecode.org/mailman/listinfo/gecode-users
