Auxiliary Methods

For making the access to the most important resources as easy as possible, the basic Agent provides two methods for getting the MAFFinder and for getting a communication service for a System.

getMAFFinder()

This method looks up for the MAFFinder proxy registered in this System. It returns the first entry of the array of proxies that are available. There can be more then one MAFFinderProxy registered in the System when no real MAFFinder is running and two communication services have registered their MAFFinderServiceProxy.

getCommService(String agentsystem)

To find a communication protocol to connect to an Agent System is not a simple task since they could have different protocols available. This method tries to find a common communication protocol for the local and remote Agent System. It does this by querying the MAFFinder for a list of communication services available at the remote System and by comparing them to the available services on this System. It uses therefor the naming conventions as described in the Section on page . Any non - conform communication protocols will be ignored by this method. When a common protocol was found this method returns the proxy to the local communication service providing this protocol. This method should always be used when accessing another Agent System over the net and the available protocols are not known to the Agent. The result of this method could be cached by the Agent for calling to the same Agent System the next time.