CARMA: Platform Freedom for a Graphical Lisp Application through Armed Bear Common Lisp

CARMA is an advisory system that uses artificiallyintelligent techniques including case-based reasoning to provide advice about the most environmentally and economically effective responses to grasshopper infestations. CARMA’s core AI reasoner was initially written in Common Lisp and integrated with an Allegro Common Lisp for Windows graphical user interface (GUI). CARMA went public in 1996 and has been used successfully since. Recently, CARMA’s architecture was reworked in order to avoid periodic development and deployment fees, and to produce a platformindependent system by following a philosophy called platform freedom which emphasizes freedom from both platform dependence and software costs. The implementation also demonstrates an approach to creating a Lisp application with an appealing GUI which is web capable. This paper details CARMA’s new architecture including the two-way communication between the two distinct main parts: 1) a Lisp AI reasoner which runs inside the Armed Bear Common Lisp interpreter which in turn runs inside the Java interpreter (JVM), and 2) a Java GUI which runs inside the JVM.