Swarm 2.1 available

[Marcus G. Daniels]

To the collectively evolving,

The Swarm Development Group is pleased to announce that Swarm 2.1 is ready.

   http://www.swarm.org/release-swarm.html

Swarm 2.1 is the first release done end-to-end at SDG offices in Santa Fe.

Swarm 2.1 represents five months of experience with the Java layer.
We've introduced new interfaces for performance (which can also be
used by Objective C users) and the general quality of Java
integration.  For example, the java.util Collection classes can be
used instead of Swarm collections in scheduling contexts. 
Swarm object serialization features now work on Java objects, and
Objective C users also may benefit from general improvements to the
object archiving infrastructure: the Lisp and HDF5 Archivers now
present a purely random-access interface.

The SDG continues to work on improving the breadth and quality of
Swarm installation technology and on improving Swarm portability, in
general.  Swarm 2.1 includes new binary distributions for Sparc-based
Red Hat and Debian systems, SuSE 6.3 systems, Java support for
PPC-based GNU/Linux systems, support for GNU Hurd, and support for IBM
JDK on Linux.  Windows installation is now self-contained: there is no
need for the Cygwin development environment. 

With 2.1, we distribute an InstallShield® system for Emacs
installation which provides a preconfigured JDE (Java IDE) system as
well as a SGML editing support.  We've also reworked the HDF5 support
in the R statistical package (http://www.r-project.org) to be a
dynamically loaded module.  This is useful because it means Windows
users can load and save Swarm objects and agents in R without a
complicated rebuild of R.

Finally, Swarm 2.1 coincides with a beta release of a user guide for Swarm. 
Paul Johnson is to thank for most of the content of this document, and
Alex Lancaster for his ongoing coordination and XML and DSSSL
smithing.  We hope that this package can in some sense be an ongoing
shared work product of the Swarm community -- a formalization of
current practice and the online FAQ.

Thanks go to the Santa Fe Institute for donating the Sparc and PPC
hardware that made the new GNU/Linux distributions possible, and for
continuing to host our mailing lists.  A big "thanks" to the Swarm
Corporation for their donation of office space.  And, of course, many
thanks to all the SDG members!!

CD-ROMs are available now.  SDG members: as with every major or minor
release of Swarm, we will start shipping your CD-ROMs immediately.

P.S. ftp users: you'll notice the archive has been reorganized.  If it
isn't obvious where to find what you want, there are links on the
web site for most everything.  (Things were getting out of control!)