Jayes 0.2.0 release

Jayes 0.2.0 is here!

I finally removed the SNAPSHOT marker from the plugin.xml and pom.xml files - which means i consider this a release version. Find it at Github

What is Jayes?

Jayes is an open-source Bayesian Network library written in pure Java. I wrote it as part of my Bachelor's thesis. It is used by the Code Recommenders project at Eclipse, where it predicts method calls for code completion. It performs very well, as i showed in my Bachelor's thesis (also available in the repository), and can compete even with native Bayesian Network libraries.

Why version it 0.2.0?

The reason the current version number is 0.2.0 is that at the point where i first wrote Jayes, the Code Recommenders project was in version 0.2.0. This version number is in no wise related to the state of the development of the library.

Features in version 0.2.0

- exact inference in Bayesian Networks with discrete-valued variables
- File formats: XMLBIF v0.3, GeNIe's XDSL format

License

Jayes is licensed under the EPL 1.0

How to access Wiktionary to check for the existence of a word

I was just listening to this great presentation on robotics and cloud computing, when it struck me that i could share some aimple code i wrote a while ago, with application to cloud computing (although i wouldn't call it that way).

This was for some simple game i wrote in Java, where you had to find words in a character matrix (on Facebook there is a similar game called Scramble). In order for this to work, i needed a dictionary with valid words. Now i didn't know where to get such a list of words from, so i decided to let the program learn the words by itself, through user input, but also through access to online dictionaries. Here's the code:

protected boolean checkThroughWiki(String word) {
 URL url = null;
 try {
     url = new URL("http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/" + word);
 } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
     return false;
 }
 try {
  HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
  con.connect();
  if (con.getResponseCode() == 200)
      return true;
  return false;
 } catch (IOException ex) {
  System.out.println(ex.getMessage());
  ex.printStackTrace();
  return false;
 }
}

Doesn't look to difficult, does it? Plus it worked the last time i checked. Of course this is for the german Wiktionary, so you would need to change the URL to point to the wiktionary version of your choice.
What it does is simply checking if the page that should contain the word exists.

Voila, now it's up to you to make a cloud translation or whatever library out of this. ;-)