[Oz] Future of Oz

[Peter Van Roy]

> 
> Well, since I start to prototype a somewhat largish project in Oz, I
> wonder how the future of oz looks, or:
> 
> 	Where will Oz be one year from now??
> 
> Since this is a project with tight manpower and time restrictions, I
> would be willing to stay with oz if it a) performs well (which I
> expect) and b) will be there a year from now.
> 
> Especially, is there still the motivation to develop it further, and is
> there still funding to finance that motivation? And what about the
> papers about Oz with sml-syntax, or sml with oz-capabilites, will this
> supercede oz as it stands now??
> 
> Greetings, Mathias
> 
> P.S. your mailserver does not accept my mails, so I'm sending from a
> different account.
> 
> --
>                             virtual earth
>  Mathias Picker
>  Geschäftsführer      Gesellschaft für Wissens re/prä sentation mbH

Well, from my point of view, the answer is simple: in one year, Oz will be
around, alive and kicking, with serious enhancements.  For example, just
to mention three (the other Consortium members can complement this):
- SICS is working hard on a new network layer that will allow much-improved
  behavior: higher performance, better sharing of network bandwidth, better
  scalability, etc.
- UdS has a prototype of a new graphics subsystem (Gtk) that can supersede
  Tk.  Another candidate for this is [incr tcl], which has already been used
  in an expert system done at CLAES in Egypt.  And we at UCL will put something
  like QTk on top of whichever one is chosen.
- UCL has just released (in MOGUL) a beta version of a GlobalStore abstraction,
  which does active fault tolerance for Oz objects.

Regarding financing, you would have to ask the Consortium members.
For UCL, there is financing until 2002 and several projects 'in the works'
to continue beyond that.  I'm sure that the same is true for the other
members.

Regarding the Oz with SML syntax: that is a research topic being studied
at UdS; they can give you more information.

I hope this helps answer your question,

Peter

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