ResearchAssistant (RA)

ResearchAssistant is a library to improve Java's effectiveness as a platform for creating scientific research tools. The ResearchAssistant Group on Google Groups is the main forum for documentation and support.

[download] [ examples & support ] [javadoc] [paper]

This is alpha software. It may contain bugs and its API is still in flux, even for minor version releases. That said, several researchers use it in their day-to-day research coding activities. Please contact me about any bugs, weird defaults, missing features, or awkward API issues. Requests may make it into the next minor version release. In particular, the original ECS paper describing RA is not up to date after having adapted to some early adopter feedback. Working examples can be found in the zip's test/ folder.

Version history

• RA 0.1.16 - Minor bug fix; maintenance release; Jan 14 2010
• RA 0.1.15 - Full unicode support; Mar 20 2009
• RA 0.1.13 - Improved Stringify and cleaned up code. Saving src currently unsupported; Feb 19 2009
• RA 0.1.9 - Maintenance release; some minor bug fixes; May 07 2008
• RA 0.1.8 - Simplifications and convenience updates for Arguments, Workbook, and Stages; December 08 2007
• RA 0.1.7 - Maintenance release; included missing Jakarta jar needed by Stringify on some types; September 23 2007
• RA 0.1.6 - Workbook replaced by ResourceSet as a more natural representation of a pool of resources (e.g. checkpoints); August 21 2007
• RA 0.1.5 - stages now include their arguments as part of their signature for checkpointing; August 03 2007
• RA 0.1.4 - bug fixes, xml console output off by default; March 14 2007
• RA 0.1.3 - stdin logged to JAR by default; March 3 2007
• RA 0.1.0 - initial release with paper submission, February 14 2007