Mozart Programming System

The Mozart Programming System 1.2.0

Available at: http://www.mozart-oz.org

Systems supported: many Unix flavors, Windows 98/NT/2000

Developers:

Universität des Saarlandes (UdS^?, DFKI, SFB 378 - Germany) Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS - Sweden) Université catholique de Louvain (UCL - Belgium)

The Mozart consortium is pleased to announce Mozart 1.2.0, a major upgrade to the Mozart Programming System. Previous releases were Mozart 1.0.0 in 1999 and Mozart 1.1.0 in 2000. Mozart is an advanced development platform for intelligent, distributed applications. The system is the result of a decade of research in programming language design and implementation, constraint-based inferencing, distributed computing, and human-computer interfaces. As a result, Mozart is unequaled in expressive power and functionality. Mozart has an interactive incremental development environment and a production-quality implementation for Unix and Windows platforms.

Mozart is based on the Oz language, which supports declarative programming (strict and lazy functional and logic), object-oriented programming, constraint programming, and concurrency, as part of a coherent whole. For distribution, Mozart provides a true network transparent implementation with support for network awareness, openness, and fault tolerance. Security is upcoming. Mozart is an ideal platform for both general-purpose distributed applications as well as for hard problems requiring sophisticated optimization and inferencing abilities. We have developed many applications including sophisticated collaborative tools, multi-agent systems, and digital assistants, as well as applications in natural language understanding and knowledge representation, in scheduling and time-tabling, and in placement and configuration.

The platform is released with a very liberal Open Source license (X11-style) that allows both commercial and non-commercial use. The platform includes a full-fledged interactive development environment with many libraries and tools. There is extensive documentation including tutorials covering all above mentioned application areas, a complete set of reference manuals, and many demos. There is an active mailing list as well as an extensive Web site.

Compared to previous versions, Mozart 1.2.0 offers improved usability, reliability, performance, maintainability, and portability, as well as conservative extensions for Oz and Mozart libraries. Notably, this version allows to run applications with much higher memory demands, features an improved distribution subsystem including an advanced network monitoring tool, supports a high-level user interface design tool, and facilitates porting to 64-bit architectures. The system has been extensively field-tested by internal and external use as well as in university courses and projects at UdS^? (Germany), KTH (Sweden), and UCL (Belgium).