#  '$RCSfile: README,v $' 
#  Copyright: 2000 Regents of the University of California 
# 
#   '$Author: jones $'
#     '$Date: 2003-03-19 19:58:49 $'
# '$Revision: 1.1 $'

Utilities: Common code utilities for EcoInformatics
---------------------------------------------------

Feedback and bugs to: utilties-dev@ecoinformatics.org
                      http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org

Contributors:
    Chad Berkley (berkley@nceas.ucsb.edu)
    Matthew Brooke (brooke@nceas.ucsb.edu)
    Matt Jones (jones@nceas.ucsb.edu)
    Dan Higgins (higgins@nceas.ucsb.edu)

Utilities is a collection of programming utilties intended to factor out
some commonly needed classes and functions for informatics software
development.  The ant build system (http://ant.apache.org) is used to
build release distributions for each of the utility modules. The current
modules that we have created are:
  1) ConfigXML: an XML configuration file utility in Java
  2) IOUtils: a collection of IO routines that are useful in Java
  3) IteratorTask: an ant task for repeatedly invoking a target

The build.xml file contains a target for building each of the modules
into distributable files.

Iterator uses JUnit tests to test each publicly accessible method
in each publicly accessible class.  If you make modifications to the 
utilities and wish to have your changes absorbed by ecoinformatics.org, 
we ask that you also write JUnit tests for each class and method that 
you write.  The JUnit tests can be run by issuing the command 
'ant clean test' on the command line.  Note
that you must have ant version 1.4 or higher.

What is JUnit?  Visit http://www.junit.org
What is Ant?  Visit http://jakarta.apache.org/ant

Please visit http://www.ecoinformatics.org for more information on this as
well as other projects that we are currently involved with.

Legalese
--------
This software is copyrighted by The Regents of the University of California
and licensed under the BSD; see the 'LICENSE' file for details.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. DEB99-80154 and DBI99-04777. Any opinions, findings and
conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the
author(s) and do not necessarily reflect  the views of the National Science
Foundation (NSF).