	         	 Netica-J for Linux
	         	 ==================
			   Version:  3.25
		      Release Date:  July 20, 2007

After unzipping this zip archive, please open the Netica-J manual in:
       \docs\NeticaJ_Man.pdf
and read the installation instructions it contains.
If you do not have a PDF reader, you can download one free
from:   http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html

This release has been tested on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04, Suse 10.1 and 10.2,
and Red Hat Fedora Core 5.  For each of these OSes we have also tested
with SUN's JDKs: 1.4.2_15, 1.5.0_12, and 1.6.0_02.
  Note, that several default installations of Linux include the GNU "GIJ" JRE 
that is missing some AWT classes, so if you want to do use the Netica-J
graphics classes, you must install another JDK (or JRE), such as any
of the SUN 1.4 or newer versions mentioned above.


Key Changes since the last official release (2.21):
==================================================

- added method Streamer.setPassword(), allowing you to encrypt/decrypt files.
- supports new binary file format (.neta), greatly reducing the size of
  large net files saved to disk.
- new Learner class added, which offers batch learning: EM learning and 
  gradient-descent learning.
- added a new DatabaseManager class for loading cases from, and
  writing findings to, any ODBC-compliant database (ORACLE, Sybasem,
  MySQL, SQL Server, Access, even text files).  Supports complete
  SQL query language to retrieve only the cases you want.
- added /gui package for displaying Bayesian Nets in Java.  See the examples/
  directory for two sample programs that use the new gui package.
- added ability to add or delete states to a discrete node.
- added ability to reorder the states of a discrete node.
- created a new javadocs-like web help system that includes a complete
  topic index.  In your web browser, click on docs/javadocs/index.html
  to lauch this new help system.
- renamed abstract class Generic to General, to avoid potential confusion
  with java 1.4 generics.
- added Value class for managing findings.  Use Node.finding() to access the
  finding Value object for a node.
- added CaseSet class for managing cases.
- unicode support
- new option for fast setting and reading of probability tables.


Note on the above changes.
-------------------------
Almost all of the old 2.21 methods and ways of doing things will
still work.  They are just deprecated, and so you will get compiler
warnings if you specify the "-deprecation" parameter to the java compiler
(e.g., javac.exe -deprecation ...).]  We encourage you to eventually
modify your code to the new version 3 way, since deprecated methods will
eventually be dropped.

The above changes were not made lightly.  We at Norsys are very careful
to have a very good reason for making any change to the public interfaces
of our software.  We apologize for the short-term effort any of the above
changes may cause you.  We trust the long-term benefits will more than
justify these.  We are in general very resistant to making changes
to the core API.
