Re: JCSP Network Edition now available from Quickstone Technologies Limited.

["P.H.Welch" <P.H.Welch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

Re. Jim Moores' announcement of the JCSP Network Edition and Toolset
from Quickstone (QTL) ... just a bit of background ...

Jim has just successfully defended his PhD thesis at UKC - I was his
supervisor.  He is also my first PhD student to set up his own company
(with some others - equally clever and productive)!  From their website,
<www.quickstone.com>, the main business is to provide and promote CSP-based
services of all kinds and get them used in Industry and Academia :).

They have done a deal with UKC to license and develop the Network Edition
of our JCSP libraries.  The basic (single-JVM) version of those libraries
will remain freely available (and will be open sourced under the L-GPL).

My belief is that JCSP (and related technologies) stand a much better
chance of being developed *faster* by a company - such as Quickstone -
than we can manage in University.  We have proved the point: by bringing
this material to a mature/robust/efficient/easy-to-use/documented form.
Now, it needs to be marketed and pushed forward in a way we can't do ...
even if we had a funded research project with one or two short term posts.
It needs proper commercial muscle.

The down-side to this is that licenses for the *network* extensions to
JCSP will have to be bought (but this should not prove too onerous :).
The up-side is that things will happen so much faster - technology will
become available that would take a very long (if at all) if the community
were dependent only on a few academics, who sadly have much else to do -
like mark 300 exam scripts :-( ...

On the JCSP website:

  http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/projects/ofa/jcsp/#JCSP-net

I've put up the slides (Powerpoint and PDF) of a paper I've just given
on JCSP.net.  Please take a look ... it's kind-a-neat ;).  As well as
describing JCSP.net for users, it outlines some of the technical design
(which, of course, uses standard JCSP) underlying its implementation.
Feedback, of course, is welcome and I'm happy to answer questions.
Nothing is secret ... you can re-implement it yourself ... but it would
be easier, and safer, to pick up what we've already done.  Meanwhile,
QTL need to demonstrate to their bankers some real sales ... :) :) :)

Cheers,

Peter.