Dustin Stevens-Baier
Comp 575 Multi
Agents
6-20-06
To Start with I had to fix a few bugs in the code. The first bug was
one in the addAgent method in the CIAgent class. When you first run the
PAManagerapp you get a stack error that can be traced back to the Introspection
logic in the JDK. The problem stems from the Java framework thinking that the
addAgent method is a listener method. I researched how this works and found that
introspection code used to get the target info of the object looks for methods
that begin with the add prefix, with 1 argument and a void return value. When
doing this it thinks that it is a listener method and then subtracts eight from
the length and sub strings the method. This causes the out of bounds condition
that I got when I first tried to implement the program.
This is fixed by
replacing the void return value with CIAgent and returning the child. The java
framework is no longer fooled.
After getting this bug fixed I was then
able to start up the Personal Agent Manager Application. To Create a File
Agent we just go to Create and choose File Agent.
This is an example
of the dialogue that pops up after we create a FileAgent app. 
After
I filled out the information in the File Agent. It looked like the following.
The file that I was monitoring was selected. The condition was that anytime it
was monitored a notice would be sent. Then you click initialize. 
After
clicking intiliaze the Personal Agent Manager Application now has a agent to
watch.
The next step is to start the agent which is done
by highlighting the agent and going to edit and then clicking on start
processing.
This is a picture of the file being monitored before
the modifications.
This is a picture of the file after modifications.
You can see the Personal Agent Manager Application displays a notification
when the File agent finds out that the file has been modified. Another example
is an agent that notfies when the file has been deleted.
Another
agent type in the Personal Agent Manager Application is the scheduler agent
which allows you to create agents that are like timers. You can have them go off
at intervals like this example or just once.
The Personal Agent
Manager Application also has an airfare agent and a user notification agent. The
airfare agent looks as follows.
The
airfare agent also required an alteration in the code. The line url = new
URL(http://www.bigusbooks.com/cgi-local/airfare.pl); needed to be changed to the
line url = new URL(http://www.bigusbooks.com/cgi-bin/airfare.pl); This is
because the data that the program looks for to perform the airafre requests have
changed.
This is an example of the airfare agent that requries the use
of the scheduler agent. The scheduler agent needs to be set up to notify the
airfare agent every time there is a process.
The user notification
looks as follows:
Not only do we need
the user notification agent but we also need a scheduler in order to schedule
the user agent. Once we have the scheduler set to notify the user notification
agent at intervals. We are good to go.
Every 5 seconds the
UserNotificationAgent gets notified. And the output is fed into the following
window.
There was one thing that I couldn't get to work correctly that acted
funny. Whenever you tried to schedule an event in the scheduler on a one time
notification it would instead schedule it for an interval event every 60
seconds.
