Bootstrapping, the new frontier

Bootstrapping CIlib is providing some interesting challenges.

We need to have a selection of predefined bindings and then have them dynamically overridden when needed. This is only on the specification usage of CIlib, so the API usage will remain relatively unchanged (for the moment - some setters might be removed in future versions)

To address these issues, we have written some interesting code to get the overrides working correctly. This is still very much a work in progress, but I feel we are on the right track at least.

Nothing is set in stone at the moment, but the Bootstrapping API is changing a lot. It's exciting to get the new framework up and running :D

Core issues and Dependency Injection

It's something that has been a long time coming, but CIlib is in need of a little core refactoring to ensure that the code is maintainable and most importantly, testable.

I've spent a long time examining the various Dependency Injection (DI) frameworks that are available and I've finally decided on using Guice.

The core of CIlib will rely completely on injection to get the required instances in the required places. This does, however, mean that some serious changes will be needed on the inside, but they will be changes that users will not even notice.

CIlib has some static code (in the form of singleton instances and static accessors - Algorithm.get()) and this will be removed to ensure that the library is what it is supposed to be.

More to come on this refactoring as I get into it.

Also, it's almost time to commit the missing code / algorithms :) Keep an eye out for the new Evolutionary Programming and Evolutionary Strategies algorithms that will make their way into the master branch soon.