The real MAFFinder

The real MAFFinder maintains all the data records of the different parts of the Agent Systems in the region. It uses therefor the following hash tables:

agents

A standard hash table for all Agents which are registered in the MAFFinder. The format of the entries is <Name agentname> : <Location agentlocation>. It is used to get the location of an Agent with a certain name.

agentprofiles

An OTMObjectHashtable for the profiles of the registered Agent. The format of the entries is <AgentProfile profile> : <Name agentname>. It is used to get the names of the Agent that fit into the given AgentProfile. The Locations of these Agents are stored in the agents hash table. An OTMObjectHashtable is used here since the format of all entries in the AgentProfile is still not totally defined and could be equal for more Agents.

systems

An OTMObjectHashtable for all Agent Systems that are executing in the region of this MAFFinder. The format of the entries is <Name systemname> : <Location systemlocation>. It is used to get the Location of the System with the given name and to get all communication methods available there. An OTMObjectHashtable is used here because the communication services register themselves with the name of their Agent System and the Location with the protocol and port used to access them. So there are more then one entry for the same Agent System.

systeminfos

An OTMObjectHashtable for the infos about the registered Agent Systems. The format of the entries is <AgentSystemInfo systeminfo> : <Name systemname>. It is used to get names of the Agent System fitting to a special AgentSystemInfo object. An OTMObjectHashtable is used here since the format of all entries in the AgentSystemInfo is still not totally defined and could be equal for more Agent Systems.

places

A Hashtable used to store all registered places. The format of the entries is <String placename> : <Location location>. In the MASIF standard places are handled as if they are unique in their names. This is the reason to use a normal hash table here. But if the use of places get more defined it could be necessary to switch to OTMHashtables because of equal places on different Systems.

The MAFFinder implements the MAFFinderIFace which provides the same methods as described in the MASIF standard in Section on page . The most of the work is defined well in the standard and implemented in the same way. The major difference is the handling of the AgentSystemInfo and the AgentProfile. These are not very well described in the standard and there could be some changes in the future. The next section contains more details about this.