From Agent Factory

Contents 1 Installing a Binary Release 1.1 The Agent Factory Run-Time Environment 1.2 The AFAPL2 Development Kit 1.3 The Plugin System 1.3.1 System-Wide Plugins 1.3.2 Project-Specific Plugins 2 Using the Debian Repository 2.1 Adding the Repository 2.2 Available Packages

Installing a Binary Release

Since version 1.0.0, Agent Factory consists of a core Run-Time Environment (RTE), development kits for supported agent-oriented programming languages and plugins.

The Agent Factory Run-Time Environment

The first element to be installed is the Agent Factory RTE. This is necessary to run any Agent Factory applications. This is done by doing the following:

1. Create a directory into which you wish to install Agent Factory (/usr/local/lib/agentfactory or /opt/agentfactory are possibilities). This will be referred to below as AF_HOME.
2. Download the latest version of the RTE from the download page and save it in the AF_HOME directory.
3. Unzip the archive by running "tar -xvzf af_rte-x.x.x.tar.gz" (note that x.x.x is the version number of the RTE you have downloaded). This should create the directories `bin' and `lib' in your AF_HOME directory.
4. Finally, to make the "agentfactory" command available to all users, run the following command, replacing /opt/agentfactory with the path to your AF_HOME directory:

# echo "export PATH=/opt/agentfactory/bin:\$PATH" >> /etc/profile

The AFAPL2 Development Kit

In order to be able to compile and run agents written in the AFAPL2 programming language, perform the following steps:

1. Download the latest version of the development kit from the download page and save it in the AF_HOME directory (the directory into which you installed the RTE).
2. Unzip the archive by running "tar -xvzf afapl2-dk-x.x.x.tar.gz" (note that x.x.x is the version number of the development kit you have downloaded).

The Plugin System

Additional plugins are distributed as individual JAR files. These can be installed in one of two ways.

System-Wide Plugins

A plugin can be made available to all Agent Factory programs on the system by downloading it from the download page into the AF_HOME/lib directory (where AF_HOME is the directory into which you installed the RTE)

Project-Specific Plugins

To make a plugin accessible to only a single project, create a directory called "plugins" in your project directory and save the plugin's JAR file to that directory. For more on where Agent Factory searches for plugins, have a look here.

Using the Debian Repository

The Agent Factory Debian repository should be usable on Debian or any Debian-derived Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu, SimplyMEPIS, Xandros, etc.). However the only testing is done on Debian and Ubuntu. Bugs should be reported to the [bug tracker].

Adding the Repository

Access to the repository can be gained by adding the following line into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://www.agentfactory.com/debian current main

After adding that, you'll have to grab the archive signing key for increased security. This can be done by running the following:

$ wget http://www.agentfactory.com/agentfactory-archive-key.gpg -O - | sudo apt-key add -

Once this is done, running an "apt-get update" will make the Agent Factory packages available for installation.

Available Packages

agentfactory

Agent Factory Runtime - needed by all other packages

agentfactory-mts-local

Local Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-http

HTTP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-mts-udp

UDP Message Transport Service plugin

agentfactory-fipa

FIPA agent plugin

agentfactory-afapl2

The AFAPL2 Developers Kit

agentfactory-common-logic

Common Logic API

agentfactory-common-compiler

Common Compiler API

agentfactory-compatibility

Compatibility API

agentfactory-efrafa; The EFRAFA plugin for efficient file transfers

At present, all of these packages will cause the appropriate plugin to be installed globally (i.e. in the /usr/lib/agentfactory/lib directory), and so they will be usable by all Agent Factory programs on your machine.