[gecode-users] The Future of Gecode/J

[Christian Schulte]

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/