Last edited on 20 June 2003 by gs/ gs.

Project Voyager

Voyager is a project to explore the feasibility of a portable and extensible system for simulation and data analysis systems. The Voyager project is carried out by StatLab Heidelberg. All components of Voyager are intended to be open for the public domain.

Voyager under Oberon S3

A survey article is published in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Volume 5 No 3 (1996) 263-283. Voyager has been demonstrated at Compstat 94. The (revised) Compstat manuscript is here as a PDF file. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read this file.

Voyager Missions

There are two main variants of Voyager, or missions if you like. The first variant, Voyager I, is the main development line. It is designed to be portable and may be integrated in various environments. For development, this versions needs an Oberon System 3 environment.
Voyager II, launched later on a similar track, is an experimental variant which tries to get additional impetus from other developments in computing, like BlackBox or Java. If features explored by Voyager II prove reliable and efficient, they may be eventually rolled into the main development line, Voyager I.

Installing Voyager

Voyager I

For the original Voyager system, Oberon System 3 is recommended as a run time environment. Other implementations are available on request. If you have a CD version of the StatLab software, you find Oberon System 3 with a pre-installed Voyager for Macintosh and Windows in the SYSTEMS.RDY directory. To install the most recent alpha test version from the internet or CD, follow these steps:

Get and install Oberon System 3 with Gadgets. See the Oberon page for more information.
Get familiar with Oberon System 3. In particular, you will need to know how to configure your system and how to install additional packages.
Check whether your Oberon System supports compress with encryption. If not, download and install the updated compress system. The Voyager installation makes use of an improved compression scheme which allows for source encryption. When the update has been moved into the Oberon distribution, this step will not be necessary.
Contact voyager@statlab.uni-heidelberg.de for a license agreement. We need to know which Oberon version you have installed, and which host operating system you are using. We will tell your which Voyager variant or version to download for your system.
Download the recent Voyager sources from the alpha directory.
Start Oberon and use the command Installer. Install with your license keyword to install Voyager. Installer. Install will compile the sources in place.
Open the Voyager directory vy and work through the Examples. Log to verify that the installation was successful.

Voyager II

The experimental variant Voyager II is used in the shrink wrapped spin off applications. Each of these applications comes with specific installation instructions, unless the installation procedure is obvious. Spin off variants usually will be posted in the projects section of this server. For information about how to create Voyager spin off applications, contact voyager@statlab.uni-heidelberg.de.

Documentation

At present, the documentation is still under development. You can access various parts of the documentation in a separate directory. This directory contains:

Postscript documentation: A documentation for some key components, available in Postscript.
Definition files (HTML)

At present, most of the Voyager software is in alpha phase. Some examples are available as beta software, and selected source files are published.

Voyager is based on Project Oberon of ETH Zürich. If you want to use the Voyager source code, you have to be familiar with the Oberon language. See our Oberon page for more information on Oberon, and for access to Oberon source material.

We try to keep to certain development phases. Voyager software may be in one of these phases

development (strictly internal): In general, this software should not have escaped our local environment. Eventually, it may be necessary to publish software at this stage to make other parts usable.
alpha (access by agreement only): This software should only be available to you if you are registered as an alpha test partner. If you encounter any errors or problems, we expect an immediate feed back. You should not quote nor propagate this software. Typically you should regard this software as outdated if it is older than one month.
beta: Interface definitions have been fixed for this software and basic tests have been passed. You may use this software on your own risk. Bug reports are welcome.
final to publish: -- you should never see these versions in public
public: checked and free for use (but, as always, no guarantees).

Voyager is distributed from statlab.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.113.100]. #Beta software and later will be available via ??. For access to development and alpha software, contact G. Sawitzki <gs@statlab.uni-heidelberg.de.
Selected contributions from Voyager are available by ftp from ETH Zürich.