Before you do anything else, please read the file "LICENSE", located in this directory. It contains the software license you are bound to if you wish to use this software. Additionally, please see the following important files: docs/index.html ECJ documentation. Start here. docs/manual/manual.pdf The ECJ Owner's Manual. A large reference work describing ECJ in detail. Go through the tutorials before bothering with this one. LICENSE ECJ's license CHANGES Change log. Very important! Makefile Useful if you're running under UNIX ECJ has two modules which rely on external libraies which you can download as JAR files from the ECJ website (here: http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/libraries.zip ). None of the libraries are required, but if you don't install them you need to tweak ECJ a bit in order to get it to compile: - The GUI system relies in part on the JFreeChart and iText libraries. If you do not install these, you cannot compile the GUI at all. You can completely delete the GUI code if you like (it's entirely contained within ec/display/ ) or if you're using Makefile, just do "make" rather than "make gui". - The distributed evaluation and island model code relies on compressed socket options for more efficiency, and Java's standard libraries are broken, so they require the JZlib library. If you do not install JZlib library, the code will still compile but you will need to turn compression *off* in order to run distributed evaluation or island models. TO COMPILE: under UNIX, just type: make gui (if you have JFreeChart and iText installed) or make (otherwise) You can build a JAR file out of ECJ, if you like, with make jar WHERE TO ASK QUESTIONS: if you're really stuck, try the ECJ-INTEREST mailing list. (see "Mailing Lists" at http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/ ) Thanks, Sean Luke ECLab, Department of Computer Science George Mason University ECJ: http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/ ECLab: http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/