Getting Started with Swarm

Swarm Development Group

2003-09-08

Licence terms for Swarm documentation

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

The XML source and associated utilites needed to generate this documentation can be found in the package: swarmdocs-2003-09-08.tar.gz. Whilst the documentation itself is under the GFDL, all code for used to generate the documentation is distributed under the GNU GPL.

Licence terms for Swarm software

The copyright holders make no representation about the suitability of Swarm for any purpose. It is provided “as is” without expressed or implied warranty. Please refer to the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute Swarm must be in accordance with the GPL.

30 December 2004

Overview

Learning to program with Swarm will require reading example applications, studying the technical reference material and sometimes even getting down to the level of reviewing the header files in libraries. It does currently require a good hands-on knowledge of object-oriented programming and software development processes in general.

Swarm is not yet a `shrink-wrapped' simulation toolkit. There are many of those kind of products on the market. However, with these packages, the ease of use comes at a price - you are locked into the that vendor's particular modelling paradigm. Swarm was intended to embrace many different types of modelling - consequently, it can be more difficult for a novice user - but more powerful in the long-run.


Table of Contents

Installing Swarm
Overview of the Swarm Distribution