Mission

To build as complete as possible toolbox for software developers. We want to build up a large repository/library of ADTs, algorithms, and components that can be used as building blocks for more sophisticated applications. To achieve this we will rely on the power, flexibility and efficiency of the open source community.

Joining

Anyone who agrees with our philosophy and is willing to contribute something useful is free to join. Before requesting admission to the project, though, you should probably read our team policies.

Motivation

Probably every developer has had to deal at least once with lists or trees. Many students have had to implement the same ADTs over and over again, in the process generating many essays on the subject. This has led to the creation of a set of standard ADTs and standard algorithms which have been topic of so many research papers that one could say that ADTs and algorithms are one of the best known fields in computer science. Yet somehow, it still seems like every developer has to reinvent them over and over again. Electrical engineers don't build a transistor from scratch, but in some ways that is the situation as it exists in computer science. Lists, trees and related algorithms should be available just like electrical components for an electrical engineer. True, these components don´t make the majority in modern development, but collecting even a fraction of them will save an enormous amount of time.

On the other hand there are many developers who have realized that they need certain components in many applications and have started to build up their own libraries (e.g. for Math). It is obvious that there must be a trade off between time capacity and quality/completeness of the code.

We see a great chance in uniting and coordinating the efforts of the open source community to create a well-designed, easy to use library of high quality, optimized and reliable standard components. By using these components one can concentrate on the domain-specific challenges of the application, instead of being forced to reinvent the wheel with each project.