PDARunner

PDARunner Interface

Figure 8.3. PDARunner Interface


The PDARunner is a small tool for starting Mica agents on a PDA. The interface for PDARunner can be seen in Figure 8.3.

The top line of the interface allows the user to select the blackboard the agent is to connect to. The second line allows the user to select the amount of debugging information they want to see. The third line is a pull down menu of currently available agents. Below this is a text area which will display all debugging output the agent writes using unsw.cse.mica.util.Debug. At the very bottom of the interface is the button to start the agent.

Note

As yet the PDARunner only supports XML over TCP transports as it is not yet known whether SSL sockets are available on the PDA.

PDARunner Configuration

<agent class="unsw.cse.mica.demo.PDAAgent" >
    <classpath >
        <pathelement url="pdaagent.jar" />
    </classpath>
    <arg param="context" value="example" />
</agent>

Figure 8.4. Example PDARunner Configuration File


An example configuration file for PDARunner is shown in Figure 8.4. The PDARunner looks in the \My Documents\Jars\ folder of the PDA for its agent configurations. Any file with a name like 'agent-*.xml' in the folder is considered to be an agent configuration file.

The root element of the file is an agent tag which gives the class for the agent and optionally a name for the agent.

When the PDARunner is started it uses a minimal classpath so the agent can be given a classpath tag to add required classes to the classpath. Each new jar file or package location is added using a separate pathelement tag.

If needed, the configuration file can list a series of parameters using arg tags that will be passed to the agent in its init method.

The precise format for the PDARunner configuration files can be found in pdarunner.dtd.