ARtool Miscellaneous Information
The Making Of ARtool
ARtool has been written using the GNU Emacs editor, Sun's JDK, and
Sun's Forte for Java CE IDE. All these programs can be downloaded for
free from www.gnu.org and, respectively, from java.sun.com. I have
used Forte for the initial design of the frames and dialogs, but the
coding was done exclusively in emacs, which is my favorite editor.
The user interface is, quite obviously, done using Swing. ARtool has
been compiled and tested using JDK 1.3.1_01
About the version number
The version number of ARtool consists of three values (for example
2.7.23) that have the following signification: the first value is the
major version number for ARtool and will change only when significant
changes will be made to the application; the second value is the
revision number for ARtool, this will change whenever an update will
be made to the interface and will be reset to 0 whenever the major
version number is incremented; finally, the third value represents the
ARtool packages revision number, this will get incremented whenever I
will update one of the ARtool packages and will never be reset to
0. The first release of ARMiner started at version 1.0.0.
Various information
- Since association rule mining is a task that requires lots of
memory, you should allocate as much memory as you can to your Java
Virtual Machine (JVM). In the case of Sun's JVM, you can do this using
the -Xmx parameter, as in the following example which
allocates 256MB to the JVM:
java -Xmx256M -jar ARtool.jar
- Use the Program/Force garbage collection menu item if you
desire to call explicitly the garbage collector.
- If you run out of memory during the execution of ARtool, the error
message will appear in the console instead of the log window. You can
notice that something wrong happened if the Go button gets enabled but
no results are shown. It's a good idea to discard all results and call
the garbage collector before starting a mining operation that may need
all the memory you have.
- Currently, ARtool's .db format is identical to the one
used by ARMiner, so ARMiner databases can be used with ARtool and
vice-versa.
- If you abort the generation of a database, the resulting database
is still usable, but it doesn't have the number of rows you
requested.
- If you abort the execution of a frequent itemset mining algorithm,
you can still display its partial results by selecting "Use Cache".
- All the strings from the user interface are located in file
Strings.java. If you need to translate ARtool to your
favorite language, then simply translate this file.