Final (likely) version of JES released, 18 years after first release

JES 6.0 is now available at https://github.com/gatech-csl/jes/releases/tag/6.0. JES is the Jython Environment for Students — it’s a Python IDE implemented in Java and with support for Media Computation built in. It was a lot of work for a bunch of people. Here are the notes from the release as a summary and acknowledgement for all the effort that brought this version fruition.

This is likely the final version of JES, unless a Jython 3.0 is developed.

This version was brought to completion by Nigel Charleston, based on the beta work of Veronica Day and Audrey Zhang (see discussion at this blog post https://computinged.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/beta-release-of-new-jes-jython-environment-for-students-now-available-media-computation-for-python-ide/). Many thanks to R. Benjamin Shapiro for helping us with many technical questions.

JES 6.0 updates Jython to 2.7beta, uses the latest version of JMusic (from https://jythonmusic.me/), fixes many bugs, will run with Java 8, and creates a new facility to generate pictures from a collection of pixels and sounds from a collection of samples.

The Mac version is a little more complicated to run than usual. You will need to have Java 8 installed to run JES. Thanks to Brian Howard and Michael Stewart for helping to figure this out.

The rest of the Mac version installation instructions can be found at the release page.

JES was originally written by a team of Georgia Tech undergraduates taking Senior Design in Summer 2002. It’s been in use and (sporadic) development for almost 18 years now. The previous version of JES was downloaded over 71K times (see counts here). I would not have predicted in 2002 that JES would still be used in 2020, with little maintenance and no additional funding. Software has to be continually maintained, right? I claim no great genius behind the design. How did it happen that it’s still working and being used?

An even more interesting example is our Squeak-based Wikis (Swikis) which were first developed in 1997. Jeff Rick created the version that we used in classes, and wrote about the process in what I think is the first ACM publication on wikis in 2000. Even after he graduated in 2007, they just kept going. The server http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ is still running today — I can find at least one Swiki there dating from 2002. I’ve patched the Swiki software only once or twice since Jeff graduated. Jeff did a great job designing Swiki, but I suspect that even he’d be surprised at how long they’ve run with essentially no maintenance.

What are the characteristics of educational technology that remains viable and usable (i.e., useful and actively used) with very little maintenance for well over a decade? Schools are under-resourced, as I talked about in the Thorndike vs Dewey blog post. It’s great to have educational software that just keeps going without maintenance. Maybe that it’s a certain class of software that works like this. Is it that JES and Swiki do so little, such that they’re really just frameworks on which to hang others’ content? Maybe that’s why they’ve been able to keep going for so long?

Your thoughts would be welcome.