[ TechnoCage | Caskey | liftor ]
Liftor is both an exercise in concurrency and threading and a software toy. It simulates the movement of people around a building. As an application, it is about as interesting as Hello World. As a bunch of code to fiddle with, it is a learning toy and a place to investigate concurrency and object orientation.
Liftor started out as the solution to a homework problem where I didn't take the time to read the assignment carefully and though that the people moving about the building had to be threads as well.
Those looking for a framework or environment to explore concurrency will find many constructs such as Mutexes, Queues, Thread Pools and such inside of Liftor. The concurrency stuff makes use of Doug Lea's concurrency library with only a few modifications.
It's easy to run, you just need to decide if you want to observe the
whole building or actual blow-by-blow events. The only difference
in how you run it is which output you redirect to /dev/null
These instructions assume you are running liftor 1.2.2 under the bash shell.
$ java -jar liftor.jar
$ java -jar liftor.jar > /dev/null
$ java -jar liftor.jar 2> /dev/null
It's not really something you would install, it's just a jar file.
If you want to run it, fetch the jar, if you want to hack on the code, get the tar.
Each package available in the distribution is listed in a GPG signed file created by the distributor, Caskey L. Dickson. You can get a copy of my key for verification here. For those without GPG, you can compare the checksums of the distribution to those in the file checksum.txt in the download directory.
Older versions are also available in that directory.
Input, testing and feedback was graciously provided by a number of people who are listed in the README.
The author can be contacted via his email address below, or he can be found on the freenode.net irc network, often idling in #sashenka. Freenode is at irc.freenode.net:6667.
http://www.technocage.com/~caskey/liftor/
