JaCoP library provides constraint programming paradigm implemented in Java. It provides primitives to define finite domain (FD) variables, constraints and search methods. The user should be familiar with constraint (logic) programming (CLP) to be able to use this library. A good introduction to CLP can be found, for example, in [12].
JaCoP library provides most commonly used primitive constraints, such as equality, inequality as well as logical, reified and conditional constraints. It contains also number of global constraints. These constraints can be found in most commercial CP systems [3, 18, 4, 16]. Finally, JaCoP defines also decomposable constraints, i.e., constraints that are defined using other constraints and possibly auxiliary variables.
JaCoP library can be used by providing it as a JAR file or by specifying access to a directory containing all JaCoP classes. An example how program Main.java, which uses JaCoP, can be compiled and executed in the Linux like environment is provided below.
or
Alternatively one can specify the class path variable.
In Java application which uses JaCoP it is required to specify import statements for all used classes from JaCoP library. An example of the import statements that import the whole subpackages of JaCoP at once is shown below.
Obviously, different Java IDE (Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.) and pure Java build tools (e.g., Ant) can be used for JaCoP based application development.