MASIF Classes

To make the platform compatible to the MAFFinder part of the standard and to prepare it to be some day compatible to the MAFAgentSystem as well there were some special classes needed to be implemented.

In detail are these the AgentSystemInfo which is used in the MAFFinder to hold properties and a description of the registered Agent System. The class Name contains the ID of a general part of the System which can be the ID of an Agent or System Agent or the ID of the Agent System. Also to be mentioned here is the class AgentProfile which is in the agent package and contains like the AgentSystemInfo general properties of the Agent.

Some of the classes are using special constants for properties which are still not defined by the OMG. To provide a central class for these constants (like the used programming language or serialization mechanism) there exists the static class MASIFConstants. This class only contains the constants, still in a TAgents proprietary form, but easy to be adapted to a convention of the OMG.

The class Location is like an URI [URI98, Uniform Resource Identifiers] and can hold the location of an Agent System, a System Agent, an Agent or a place. The location of a component of an Agent System can be represented by a URL [URL94, Uniform Resource Locators] in the following form:

With the parameters in brackets [] are optional. When giving the URL to an Agent you have to give a placename too, otherwise it would not be easy to distinguish between a place and an Agent. This is important since the Location internally uses entries for places, Agents, System names, hosts, ports and protocols. The URL itself is every time generated off these values. The Location class is also capable of parsing a given URL to a Location object providing both ways of accessing. You can generate a Location with all the parameters (which can be null if they are is not used) or of an ID of a System or Agent since these contain the ip number as well as the name of the System.