I enclose 3 Referee reports on your paper. We would be pleased to accept it and could you please send me a new version before November 5 99 Please send a memo describing any suggestions of the referees that you did not address Ignore any aggressive remarks you don't think appropriate but please tell me. I trust you! Note weak reviews. Please improve paper so I can accept. I will try to do so! Thank you for your help in writing and refereeing papers! Referee 1 ************************************************************ Subject: C437 JGSI Review C437:The jCrunch Java Numerical Libraries a) Overall Recommendation reject b) Words suitable for authors This paper describes the jCrunch numerical library for Java. jCrunch is implemented to interface with existing Fortran numerical libraries. jCrunch may be a useful tool for scientific programmers. However, this paper is not appropriate for this journal. Basically, this paper is a user's guide for jCrunch. There are no research ideas presented in this paper, nor any interesting or new results. Referee 2 ************************************************************ Paper Number: C437 Title: The jCrunch(TM) Java Numerical Libraries Author: William N. Reynolds The paper describes an effort to produce high-quality numerical libraries in Java. The approach taken is to automatically translate high-quality numerical libraries in Fortran into Java. Up to three versions of each function are created: (1) A pure Java version; (2) A JNI wrapper around a compiled Fortran version; and (3) A Native Broker version, which automatically selects one of the first two at runtime. Recommendation: Reject. While the existence of these libraries certainly merits a conference publication to alert the community, the paper is neither deep nor well-written enough to merit publication in a journal. Furthermore, the most interesting questions raised by the paper are never addressed, such as the means by which the Fortran-to-Java translation was accomplished, and the treatment of related work is much too cursory. The paper instead is almost entirely a description of the Java interface to the libraries, certainly not an exciting or particularly relevant topic. Comments for the author ----------------------- Major comments: 1. Related work is mentioned once, in the final paragraph of the Introduction. However, it is not analyzed or described at all. I don't know what was done in [1,2,3], nor what jCrunch provides that those works do not. 2. The paper begins by talking about translating Fortran to Java, in the first paragraph of Section 2. This is an important issue; it caught my attention and made me excited to read the paper. But all I learn about this is that is has 2 drawbacks, and a few sentences apiece on how these drawbacks are addressed. In my opinion, this topic should be explored in considerably more depth. It is a much more important issue than the details of the Java interface to the libraries. 3. The sample application in the appendix is useless without some detailed commentary or explanation to go with it. I don't know what I am supposed to learn by reading it. Minor comments: Where is the abstract? Page 1, line 2: omit the apostrophe from "It's" Page 1, last sentence of section 1: "... four years after *the* introduction of Java ..." Page 1, paragraph 4, line 1: "The jCrunch libraries are *a* set of ..." Page 2, line 4: omit the apostrophe from "API's". Page 2: combine the last 3 paragraphs of Section 2. Page 3: the last example on the page is meaningless to me. What is it trying to demonstrate? What do all those variable names mean? Page 4, last line: move to the next page. Page 6, line 7: "Subarrays" is missing the second 'a'. Page 6, second sentence of "Offsets and jCrunch": omit the parenthetical remark. It will just confuse people. Page 6, next to last sentence: How am I going to note that? This still looks like alphabet soup to me. Page 7, 1st sentence: Capitalize "every". Page 8, line 4 of "Drawbacks of Native Code": "segmentation violation", instead of "segmentations violation". Page 8, line 6 of "Drawbacks of Native Code": omit the apostrophe in "DLL's". Page 9, References: reference 3 should be a footnote instead. Referee 3 ******************************************************** Subject: JGSI Review "The jCrunch Java Numerical Libraries" Sorry. It is hard to review it. It this enough ? BTW, when can we get the results or comments ? I do not recommend this paper will be acceptable. 1) INSIGHT: The authors describe design of Java Numerical Libraries. 2) INTEREST: Nothing. 3) NOVELTY: The package is implemented using native broker that allows a user to select subroutines dynamically. 4) SOUNDNESS: It is difficult to be confident about soundness. Mainly, it is described related to interface. 5) TECHNIQUE: I do not understand techniques from the presentation. 6) PRESENTATION: The presentation is too short. The author should write technical details. 7) COMMENTS: I think this paper needs technical core. Especially, the performance is important on mathematical packages.