-----Original Message-----
From: MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit
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[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sean Luke
Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2013 11:52 AM
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Subject: Re: MASON with JUNG
So a bit of history. Back in the early days of MASON development, we put
together a social networks package due to an internal request. It's called
'socialnets' and is part of the contrib packages right now. That package
isn't used much and hasn't been tested much. But it's pretty well done i
think, and with some polish maybe we should roll it into the rest of MASON.
'socialnets' has a lot of analysis facilities but doesn't have any
visualization: it builds on MASON's network package and so its social
networks may be visualized using MASON's network facility. Which is
moderately primitive.
Maciej Latek, here at GMU, wanted to use JUNG instead, and decided to write
some code which bridged the two a while back. That's the Jung package you
see on the MASON website, and it's the 'jung' package in the contrib
directory. It's not been updated in quite some time, and so no doubt is
suffering from bitrot as MASON gets updated. Also Jung isn't known for its
speed.
Hooking MASON up with other people's libraries often entails a bit of hassle
because these libraries often aren't particularly well designed, and are
rarely separable, serializable, or self-contained. It's annoying: they
don't think about interoperability with other toolkits. For example, we had
to bug the JTS folks to get them to add serialization so GeoMASON would be
serializable like a proper MASON toolkit. JUNG is typical of this
unfortunately. It doesn't help that JUNG hasn't been updated for three
years.
So anyway with some tweaking you should be able to get the JUNG toolkit
working again with MASON -- we haven't deviated that much. Also Richard, if
you'd like to add some contributions to the JUNG contrib directory, or
indeed take it over, let me know. And last, try the socialnets package.
It'd be nice to have people banging on it and finding bugs or making
improvements -- it's a nice little package I thought.
Sean