Interface Structures

The general interface for the communication of an Agent is called AgentCommIFace. This does not say anything about the protocol used. If an Agent asks for this interface it gets all entries of the communication proxies back.

Every communication service provides a specific protocol and uses its own interface. This interface is derived from the basic AgentCommIFace and is named according to the protocol (see Section

on page

for details about naming conventions). The interface for the RMI protocol is named RMIAgentCommIFace and for the plain socket protocol PLSAgentCommIFace. Since both implementing the AgentCommIFace this interface is also registered in the platform when the proxy is registered there. The routine to register a proxy registers also sub-interfaces and interfaces of subclasses. The Figure

shows the hierarchy of the interfaces. All sub-interfaces do not add additional methods, the methods of all the AgentCommIFace and the sub-interfaces are the same.