University of Calgary
Rob Kremer
Individual Assignment 2:
Adding a new Tab to the Interface



CPSC 662/568: Agent Communication
(Formerly CPSC 601.68/599.68)
 Winter 2014

Department of Computer Science
Computer
Science
Note: This is an individual assignment. You may brainstorm with other students, but the bulk of the work and the bulk of the ideas must be your own. That entails that you may not share a drawing by copy-and-paste or by any other means. If you do work with other students (or anybody else) you must cite that collaboration explicitly in your submitted assignment. This is good practice in any circumstances.
The objective is to create an new agent that adds a new tab to its AbstractInternalFrame interface.  This is actually rather easy to do.  To make it little harder, the tab component should display a count of all of each kind of performative it has seen in the messages for both incoming and outgoing messages (separately).  Thus, the contents of the tab should look something like this:
Received Messages:
request: 3
agree: 2
refuse: 1
Sent Messages:
request: 3
refuse: 3
Most of the information you need for this assignments is in the Feb 13 lecture, User Interfaces.  The tab panel is set up using your choice of Swing Component class and the TransientAgent methods described in the lecture notes.  You can add your tab in your agent's initializeThread() method. You can easily monitor the agent's message events using the Observer pattern by making your Component class an Observer which observes the Agent as a Subject. 

The easiest way to test your agent is by including a public static main(String[] args) method which instantiates your agent.  This will let you easily run a test from the Run menu item from the Eclipse editor popup menu.  For example:
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Runnable1<TransientAgent,Void> code = new Runnable1<TransientAgent,Void>() {
            public Void run(TransientAgent agent) {

		... any code you want to run after your agent initializes ...
                    } 
        };
        CASAUtil.startAnAgent(TransientAgent.class, "Fred4", 6234, code);
    }
The CASAUtil.startAnAgent() method is only in the latest version of the casa jar, and I've reproduced it here if you want to just include it in your source rather than download CASA again:

    /**
     * Run an agent of type <em>theClass</em> named <em>agentName</em> on port <em>port</em>, optionally
     * executing <em>code</em> once the agent is started up.  This can be really useful for testing new
     * agents.  
     * @param theClass The class of the agent to start.
     * @param agentName The name of the new agent.
     * @param port The port for the new agent.
     * @param code The code to execute once the agent starts up -- it will be passed the actual agent
     * when it is called; may be null.
     */
    public static void startAnAgent(Class<?> theClass, String agentName, int port, Runnable1<TransientAgent,Void> code) {
        BufferedAgentUI buf = new BufferedAgentUI();
        TransientAgent agent = CASAProcess.startAgent(buf, theClass, agentName, port, "PROCESS", "CURRENT", "TRACE", "10", "TRACETAGS", "info5,warning,msg,iRobot,-boundSymbols,-policies9,-commitments,-eventqueue,-conversations");
        if (agent==null) {
            System.err.println(buf.result());
            System.exit(-1);
        }
        while (!agent.isInitialized()) { //wait for the agent to startup
            try {
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            }
        }
        try { // give the agent some time to get started
            Thread.sleep(3000);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        }
        if (code!=null) {
                code.run(agent);
        }
    }


UofC
CPSC 662/568: Agent Communication
 Department of Computer Science
Last updated 2014-02-13
Rob Kremer