October the 19th, 2006

Forum disabled due to continuous spam attacks

Because of the permanent spam attacks I finally decided to close down the forum. I've done this for two reasons: first, I'm tired of investing time into cleaning up the member list and/or forum posts of stuff uploaded by robots. This happens nearly every day and unfortunately it is not possible to protect the forum against such robots because it is not possible to install appropriate forum modifications. Second, Sourceforge already provides a message board, so in the future this board will be used. The old forum will stay will it is, with the difference that user registration has been disabled.

September the 15th, 2006

Version control system moved from CVS to Subversion

Since the beginning of this year Sourceforge.net offers Subversion support. This has been taken as a occasion for moving the version control system. All development takes place in subversion repository from now on. The SVN address is https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/evolvica. Please note that the trunk at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/evolvica/trunk contains the last release version 0.6.3 and will be left untouched. The actual development takes place on the branch at https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/evolvica/branches/fork-0.7. You can browse the repository via ViewCVS at http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/evolvica.

September the 2th, 2006

Evolvica wakes up after a longer period of sleep

After a longer time of inactivity Evolvica is slowly waking up again. The last official release dates back to July 2004, the last work on the source code was done in February 2005. In the meantime there were a couple of other things with a higher priority, so the project fell asleep. But now there's time left to reactivate the project, mainly for two reasons: first, there are a couple of ideas that were collected during the last two years that I would like to realize. Second, I still receive mails containing bug reports or feature requests. In the past I wasn't able to help because of a lack of time, but it seems there is at least some interest in an EA framework.
Some remarks to further development: all the releases (from initial eaLib to Evolvica 0.6.3) were prepared during my time as research assistant at the Technical University of Ilmenau. In that period I had the opportunity to work part time or partially even full time on Evolvica and was paid for it. These times are over, in the future Evolvica is just my personal Evolutionary Computation playground. For this reason don't expect rapid progress in development, although my wishlist for future releases is quite long ...
Development will focus on the following main issues:

Improvement of the algorithm engine and further separation from the EA library. Evolvica was designed with such a separation as a feature from the beginning, so this just follows the initial trail.
More examples, both simple and complex. The current amount of examples is not appropriate for showing the flexibility of the operator based structure of algorithms.
Ease of use of the class library. Most people seem to use Evolvica as a class library and ignore the graphical algorithm editor. So development will concentrate on the class library. The UI was developed against Eclipse 2.1.x and is now outdated. UI development costs quite a lot of resources, resources that not be available in the future (at least most likely). Evolvica 0.7 will also provided as an Eclipse plugin, but most probably without the UI component. In addition there will be no branded stand-alone version any longer, although the 0.6.3 release will still stay available for historical reasons.
Long term features are algorithm templates, portable operators, parallelization of algorithms and data collection/visualization. These are things that were touched by some of my former students in the past but need to be improved before releasing them to the public.

And finally: help is still appreciated ...