Relation between IDE and end-user application

The image below shows in which context Agent.GUI can be used for your individual agent project.

Starting form the developer’s perspective (blue arrows), which means starting from a project in your IDE, you just have to bind the file AgentGui.jar to your project. Herewith all used resources of Agent.GUI will be also available in your own project, including JADE, Hyperic-SIGAR, JUNG, BATIC and so on. If necessary, you can add further jar-archives to your project as well and start with your developments. The final output of your project should be a jar-file, which can be added later on into Agent.GUI as an external resource.

The second important step for using your agent-project with Agent.GUI is to start the end-user application (by executing the AgentGui.jar) and create a new project (see menu: 'Projects' => 'New project'). Doing this, the project window with its four main tabs will appear which allows at first the general project configuration and later on the usage of your agent system by the end user. To not explain everything here, we would like to point to the tab "Configuration" => "Resources". Among other, external resources can be configured there.

Going back to the IDE and notwithstanding the drawing above, Agent.GUI allows not only the usage of external jar-files during its runtime. Furthermore it’s allows also the binding of a project bin-Folder of your IDE. The image on the left shows exemplary a folder structure of a JAVA project called “Game of Life”. If set (in Eclipse it is "Project" "Build Automatically"), all necessary .class-files, which has to be created from your source code, will be build and placed here.

Such a bin-folder can just be selected as “External jar resource” as well, which simplifies the switching between IDE and a running agent system for testing and debugging tasks. In order to do such testing by using Agent.GUI, you have to configure a new “Java Application” in the “Run Configurations” of your IDE and set  agentgui.core.application.Application as the Main class of your project. Additionally you can set "Program arguments" in the "Arguments"-tab. Here the setting "-project myproject" will directly open your project in the application window.

The development of an agent project ends up with the final export of your projects jar-archive and a final configuration of your agent project in the application window of Agent.GUI. This will be described in the next section.