issues building the Java part of swarm, objective-C patches, and a and request for opinions

[Jacob Sisk]

Hello:

I am considering using Swarm for a research project on which I am about to
embark.  After a couple of days, I was able to get most of swarm built, from
the snapshot dated 2002-03-18.  I managed to build the Java part of swarm,
but ended up with dynamic linker errors whenever I tried to run anything.

My system is:

OS: Linux (Vanilla RH 7.2, running on 2 AMD Athalon procs)
Jdk: Sun JDK 1.2.2

I was unable to build against kaffe (which seemed to handle CLASSPATH
oddly), but I prefer the Sun jdk anyways.  Is 1.2.2 the optimal jdk to use?

When I try to run a javaswarm app (such as jmousetrap, from the 2001-09-13
snap), I get the following error:

$javaswarm StartMousetrap
Exception caught: /usr/local/lib/libjavaswarm.so.1.0.0:
/usr/lib/libtcl.so.0: shared object not open
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: createBegin
        at swarm.Globals.<clinit>(Globals.java:25)


Has anyone seen this before?

Regarding Objective-C, it appears that there is a patch, but I am a little
confused about which versions of gcc (or gcc3, or egcs, or whatever) the
patch belongs to.  RH 7.2 has gcc3-objc-3.0.1-3 (I think the build used
gcc3) --do I need a patch?  I can run most of the Swarm apps that I have
found, but I would like to make sure.

Finally, I would like to solicit opinions about Swarm as a development
platform for building and analysing medium-scale multiagent simulations.
The other option is to hack it up in Matlab.  Swarm appears to have the
advantage of a large body of knowledge about these Sims built in.  On the
other hand, Matlab is very stable (in my opinion), and much of my toolset is
allready coded in that context.  Opinions?

Thanks very much,
jacob



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