New flavours of CoCoA

First released in 1988 under the scientific direction of Lorenzo Robbiano, CoCoA is a special-purpose system for doing Computations in Commutative Algebra: i.e. it is an interactive system specialized in the algorithmic treatment of polynomials, and is freely available for most common platforms. About 10 years ago, a new initiative began: namely, to rebuild the CoCoA software laboratory while removing the inherent limitations of the original. The new software comprises three main components: a C++ library (CoCoALib), an algebra computation server (CoCoAServer), and an interactive system (CoCoA-5). Of these components CoCoALib is the heart; it embodies all the ``mathematical knowledge'' and it is currently the most evolved part. The role of the other two parts is to make CoCoALib's capabilities more easily accessible. The first result of this approach is the collaboration with the project ApCoCoA (Applied Computations in Commutative Algebra), lead by Martin Kreuzer in Passau, which is built upon CoCoA and CoCoALib. It applies both symbolic and numerical computation to tackle ``real world'' problems. All the new code is free and open source software. It is downloadable from our website (http://cocoa.dima.unige.it) and released under GPL.