Re: [eclipse-clp-users] links to examples of use of eclipse

(I think I sent this reply to Kars only by mistake, so I am sending this 
to the mailing list. Apologies if this appears twice)

Hi,

As I said, the links I included in my last post were to links to 
examples of ECLiPSe being used in real world problems. If you require 
more information, you can contact the people concerned -- some of these 
people are frequent contributor to this mailing list.

As for what information commercial companies might allow to be public, I 
can say I know of cases where they will allow very little. For example, 
I personally know of one case where in papers published in conferencess, 
the authors were not even allowed to say the actual application area 
they are using the algorithm they are writing about for. let along any 
information about the actual size of problems they are solving [this is 
for a commercial application developed using ECLiPSe, and in case you 
are wondering, I was not involved in the development]. As another case, 
in the comp.lang.prolog newsgroup, one contributor (AL), mentions from 
time to time that he is using SICStus Prolog for commercial development, 
but as far as I can remember, he has never stated what exact area he is 
working on (except that he does use finite domain constraints), or given 
any concrete details of the work, beyond the approx. number of lines of 
code in SICStus.

As far as I am aware, Amzi! is a commercial product, which means they 
know about all the people who use their system (and I assume they 
probably have support contracts with them), so it is not surprising that 
they may have more information about applications using their system, 
and they have more incentive to publicise such information.

I am personally mostly involved in ECLiPSe development, so have not 
worked directly on many application development. Also, as ECLiPSe is 
open-source, we would not know about how people are using ECLiPSe unless 
we are told, or are connected to people who are doing so. I can say that 
I do know directly (beyond the links I mentioned last time) of people 
who are using ECLiPSe for commercial applications, but I don't know the 
details, nor do I know what these people (or their companies) policy is 
on releasing information. I think one thing I can mention is that I am 
working as an independent consultant for Cisco to support ECLiPSe -- 
Cisco is the owner of ECLiPSe. (I am thus not an employee of Cisco, and 
certainly do not represent Cisco in anyway in my postings here). Cisco 
does have an application that uses ECLiPSe -- I can mention this as I 
know this is public, as representatives from Cisco have participated in 
a panel discussion at a CP conference where this was mentioned. I think 
I can add that the ECLiPSe component is being used to solve "real life" 
problems.

One last thing to mention: you said that there are a lot of discussions 
of puzzle type problems and how to better solve them. This actually 
illustrate an important point: there are many ways to solve a problem, 
even simple ones like the puzzle problems, so you should not expect that 
ECLiPSe will magically solve your application problem efficiently if you 
simply model it naively. I have seen people who expect this, and are 
disappointed by the results. Moreover, the recent discussion on the 7.11 
puzzle have been all in the context of one solver (fd), while for real 
life applications, you have the additional choice of different solvers 
(mainly finite domain and Mathematical Programming solvers in ECLiPSe), 
and this choice of solvers, as well as the means to combine them in a 
"hybrid" way, is a strength of ECLiPSe, and I know that some of the 
commercial applications with ECLiPSe does use hybrid techniques.

Cheers,

Kish


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