Jonathan Kelly wrote:
Hello,
I was prompted to reply to a comment by Torsten,
Torsten Anders wrote:
> BTW: Oz is a research project and not a commercial product. You are
> most welcome to contribute to the development of the language or its
> IDE (e.g. to write a Eclipse plugin).
but inadvertently emailed Torsten directl (doh), to which he
graciously responded, and now I'd like to ask a wider audience.
I have been contracted to write a largish commercial application
(about eighteen man months, maybe more, software development being
what it is :), and have been given a fairly free hand in selecting the
techology, though I'm sure they will want to know what is it, and ask
questions of me and others, just to make sure.
I've really only just started reading through "Models", and have been
through most of the documentation on the web site, but the more I see
the more I think, "Oh yes!".
So, am I crazy to think of using Mozart? Is anyone out there using
Mozart for commercial development? Does it work well for that, or are
there things not immediately obvious that make it problematic?
I haven't actually decided yet, but it will have to be a considered
decision, and I will have to justify the decision on all the levels
that I'm sure are quite obvious.
TIA,
Jonathan.
Dear Jonathan,
I can make a few quick comments to your questions:
1. Mozart has been used for commercial development. For example, the
company FriarTuck
used Mozart for a commercial software product to do tournament
scheduling that was
actually used for scheduling a real-world sports tournament (the Big
East Women's
Basketball Season in the US in 2003/4). There are other, less
well-known projects, for
example Vanderbilt University used it in a project with the US Army
on pilot schedules.
We at UCL used it in an aerospace project that just finished this
year. This project was a
complete success according to the industrial partners.
2. Mozart is supported by our university research. We are using it as a
research vehicle
and several universities have been developing it for over ten years.
Our future plans for
Mozart are in two main areas: distributed programming (peer-to-peer,
components), and
constraint programming. We expect to use it as our research vehicle
for the foreseeable
future, since there are many interesting research questions that we
are looking at. One of
my colleagues at UCL is using Mozart for research into adaptable and
context-sensitive
GUIs (like QTk but even better!).
3. Mozart is being used in teaching in more than a dozen big
universities worldwide. This
has grown since the publication of CTM in 2004. Using Mozart for
teaching is another
direction that we will be involved in for some years to come. This
means also that quite a
number of students graduating from these universities know Mozart.
Every year our
department at UCL graduates 40 engineers who know Mozart well.
4. Mozart has an Open Source license that is quite liberal. Since the
Mozart system is itself
written in C++, you can make an argument that you are actually
writing a C++
application (can be useful for skeptical managers).
On the other hand, there are some disadvantages, e.g., Mozart is not
Java or C#, it does not
have a billion-dollar company backing it, and it does not have a .Net
port. It is also currently
only a 32-bit application (no 64-bit port yet). But this does not mean
that it is worse. E.g.,
latex was done by two people basically, Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport,
and it is more
professional and bugfree than Microsoft Word, developed by a big team
backed by large
funds over twenty years. Good books and journals are published with
latex, but not with
Word.
Peter
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