I am finishing up a multi-year project (CoralPatchSim) involving a large program ( > 60 classes). In addition to Mason, I use JFreeChart (directly), PIO (for IO with actual Excel workbooks), and JavaFX (for good file finding and folder selection). I use Maven to pull together the dependencies and make executable jars.

A few years ago, I had problems with executable jar creation, which may or may not have been related to the ever-present bugs with missing parts of Java3D and JMF. Via Maven I found a Mason jar hosted in France which had weeded those out. I don't want to change this jar until completion in several months. After that, however, I expect to continue using Maven because of the many dependencies.

If the new Mason no longer has those problems, perhaps next year I can just use the latest jar directly by linking it into Maven.

I find Maven is reasonably easy to use, thanks to Spring Boot XML examples and good free YouTube training from JavaBrains. However, I do not know of the issues with supplying jars to Maven repositories. I am hoping Maven and Eclipse will extend to making true exe files easy with the recent Java capability to do that.

I continue for the 20th year or so to use Mason in my annual class on OOP-ABMs. Thanks again for making such a magnificent tool!

Cheers!

John


________________________________
From: MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Sean Luke <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 12:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] MASON and Maven

CAUTION: This email originated from outside the organization. DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS or OPEN ATTACHMENTS unless you know and trust the sender.


MASON and ECJ long predate the existence of Maven and thus were not designed with Maven in mind.  Because some people have asked us to provide Maven support, we have done so, but, mostly thanks to Covid, our well of Maven maintainers has run dry.

Maven is surprisingly difficult and problematic to maintain at the back-end; and neither I, nor my students, nor anyone at GMU as far as I know, use it for MASON on the front-end.  This makes it very tough to maintain, and I am considering discontinuing support for it and just relying on jar files, which are simple and easily distributed.

I would like to know who in the existing mailing list use Maven, either for MASON or elsewhere, and would prefer that it be retained.  Speak up!

Sean