Re: Swarm futures (LONG)

[Jason L . Asbahr]

Greetings!

> So what would be item 1.0 on the wishlist? Portability and platform
> indepence. Both seem to be crucial for Swarm beginners, power users and
> evangelists.
> 
> So you could chalk this reason up as the 'power user imperative'

I don't think anyone could disagree with this.

> On the other hand there are numerous users out there that have not had
> the chance of getting hands on experience with Swarm because of the
> user-unfriendly combination of C/ObjC, GNU Debugger & Emacs as a
> development environment. These people would love to be able to learn
> Swarm and prototype their models with a  friendlier combination of
> compilers and debuggers. Providing a version of Swarm that runs on
> Windows95/NT or MacOS, at least to enable proof of concept simulations
> would obviously make the potential user base wastly larger. 
> 
> Call this the 'SwarmLite imperative'.

Totally.  :-)

> Firstly, to the untrained eye it seems plausible that the Swarm kernel
> (i.e. sans GUI) could  be ported to any Unix architecture which supports
> GNU + ObjC, in addition to NT, MacOS and soon Rhapsody (the Mach-kernel
> + NeXT Objects based future MacOS). 

Rhapsody == OPENSTEP, so if Swarm runs on NeXT/OPENSTEP now, it will run on
Rhapsody.  There is also the free GNUstep implementation in the works, which
could address the need for portable, elegant, and free GUI widgets.

> So why not port the GUI to Java? And I mean _only_ the GUI classes, not
> the trusted old Kernel.
> 
> This would give us the killer combination of executing the ModelSwarm on
> the existing SwarmKernel and visualizing the output either on the server
> or from a remote kernel. We could of course still have 'SwarmClassic'
> running in X-Windows environments, but the Java GUI would be an option
> for Unix and these (imagined) versions of Swarm for NT and Rhapsody.

Good point.  According to NeXT, the Java runtime is already ported 
to OPENSTEP, but the $100k license fee didn't make sense for the smaller
OPENSTEP user base.  Given the Apple purchase and the Rhapsody roll out,
they expect that it will be much easier to justify, and we will see Java
in the earliest Rhapsody releases.  I hope so!

Jason Asbahr                    808 Sul Ross  Suite 7
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