RE: Compare Swarm with Repast

[Christopher J. Mackie]

I've never understood what Paul has against Java--what's not to like about
someone else taking out your garbage? :-)

Here are a few addenda that might be useful.

1) StarLogo has been updated to something called NetLogo:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/  That's all I know about it.

2) RePast is now in v2.0 beta.  The scheduler has been rewritten, so if
you've eliminated RePast b/c of scheduling limitations, the revised code
deserves a new look.  Swarm still can do more, but the gap has narrowed.
Check the RePast list archives at SourceForge for the past several weeks to
find a summary of new stuff.

3) Based purely on the number of "how do I configure..." questions on the
two lists, RePast is going to be substantially easier for someone with
limited experience to set up.  Based purely on my own experience, it's
(much) easier to get your first model working in RePast than in Swarm.

4) As Paul notes, some things are easier in one package than in the other,
so if you have special needs, you should ask about those needs specifically.

My opinion, FWIW:

If you have to ask us which one is better, stick with RePast.  The kinds of
folks who will do well with Swarm are the ones comfy enough with building
tools in *N*X or Windows that they don't bother to ask us: they just
download both, install them, and try them out directly.  If that's not you,
RePast will get you from zero to published a lot quicker.  Moreover, Java
and comparable "managed code" languages are clearly the direction the world
is headed, so the programming skills you pick up with RePast will be more
fungible down the road (also true for JavaSwarm but a bit less so, since if
you're *really* using Swarm,  sooner-or-later you'll need to write
ObjectiveC to do the cool stuff).

On the other hand, if you know enough about computing to get Swarm installed
by trial-and-error plus a few consults to Paul's FAQ and the list archive,
*and* if you're already a competent C/ObjectiveC programmer, *and* if you
have various high-performance modeling needs that a Java VM will only
complicate (and you know enough about Java VMs to know that's true), then
Swarm may well be what you're looking for.

Hope this helps,  --Chris




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