INGENIAS Development Kit

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The list of posts of the site follows:

  • 01 Feb 2013 A Warning for Developers and Some Updates

    Due to recent emails I have received, I realise the web was not informing developers correctly about versions of the software to be used in the case of JDK and ant. The current recommended versions for INGENIAS are the following: JDK: At least 1.7.0_09 ant: At least 1.8.2 maven: At least 3.0.4 (3.0 may work as well) This information has been included in the tutorial. Also, I notice there is little documentation in the site about INGENIAS, except for the tutorial. To fill in this gap, I have added a new section with references to additional works. To conclude, there...
  • 07 Jan 2013 Update on new editor features in build 1.5-SNAPSHOT-279

    The new editor is available either as a SNAPSHOT in the Sonatype repositories, see post on SNAPSHOT repositories, or in SourceForge The editor has been modified to solve some bugfixes and to incorporate new features: The button toolbar for each diagram now supports mouse wheel events. So you can scroll up and down with your mouse New tooltips in the toolbar that combine the default help for the element to the basic information shown in the past The popup menu for editing relationships has changed to include a better access to options for editing the edges. Concretely: Labeling the edges...
  • 07 Jan 2013 Enabling snapshot versions of INGENIAS

    I deliver from time to time snapshot versions of the IDK that pass all of my tests. These versions are uploaded to the sonatype public servers, which are not the same as those of the stable releases. So, you may have a depedency with an INGENIAS product labeled with version X-SNAPSHOT, but if you did not configure properly the repositories, the dependency will not be downloaded. To solve the issue, you have to crate a file in your maven repository folder (usually is $HOME/.m2) with the following content (if you already had one, just merge it). <settings> <profiles> <profile> <id>sonatype</id>...
  • 13 Dec 2012 Headless testing with FEST

    For testing internally the GUI parts of INGENIAS, we use FEST. FEST does not support by itself headless testing,i.e., you need some X server to run your test onto. The following will work only in linux. To solve this, you need a virtual frame buffer. You need to have installed the following software: Xvfb. It is the virtual frame buffer implementation. It works as if there was a graphic card, but it does show nothing in the screen. X11vnc. It is the session emulation via VNC to enable remote access vncviewer. It is the viewer for you to optionally check...
  • 10 Dec 2012 JUnit or TestNG, that is the question

    Up until now, I have commited with JUnit as standard testing framework for testing the agents. The main reason being that it was my first testing framework and, by that time, TestNG was less known. After some extensive experiments with TestNG I am really convinced this is a better option than Junit for my problems: It has a better integration with FEST gui testing framework I really find useful the repeating-test feature, that permits through a simple annotation, to indicate how many times a concrete test is going to be executed. This is significant whenever I suspect there is some...
  • 08 Dec 2012 Reference manual for the INGENIAS Agent Framework

    The problem with starting a new web in your free time is that you forget the material you had. There is a reference manual to use when developing with the INGENIAS Agent Framework. You can find it in sourceforge. This manual tells which diagrams you need to build in order to get working. The manual needs to be updated, and I will dedicate time soon for this. Anyway, it is helpful enough to deserve a quick look. I am currently updating the structure of the project so that it is more stable and requires less time from release to release....
  • 08 Dec 2012 Always use the latest jdk version

    Sun/Oracle’s JDK 1.6 was excluded from Ubuntu repositories (the reason are security holes which would not be fixed by Oracle + license issues). Since 1.7, Ubuntu sticks to OpenJDK, which is fine, but causes troubles with my coding (yes, it should not, but it does). So, I have had to move towards Sun JDK 1.7 and try to work as I used. The drawback is that now, instead of having a nice apt-get, I had to install things manually, which I was not used to at all. When I started in linux, I used to compile everything from scratch (even...
  • 04 Dec 2012 A useful bash_completion extension for ant

    Bash_completion is an utility for bash command interpreter. This interpreter is rather common in linux, but, like the windows counterpards, requires to write too much. Readers may be aware that in latest windows version (in older ones this behavior had to be enabled), when you hit tab, the console tries to find in the same folder which file/folder starts with the same letters as the ones you wrote. In linux, due the console intensive work, we have this tab functionality as well plus bash_completion. Bash_completion is an utility that provides advanced assistance for console addicts. It finds commands that match...
  • 04 Dec 2012 A useful bash_completion extension for ant

    Bash_completion is an utility for bash command interpreter. This interpreter is rather common in linux, but, like the windows counterpards, requires to write too much. Readers may be aware that in latest windows version (in older ones this behavior had to be enabled), when you hit tab, the console tries to find in the same folder which file/folder starts with the same letters as the ones you wrote. In linux, due the console intensive work, we have this tab functionality as well plus bash_completion. Bash_completion is an utility that provides advanced assistance for console addicts. It finds commands that match...
  • 10 Nov 2012 Useful update for Maven practitioners

    The tutorial has been updated to include relevant information for Maven users. INGENIAS elements can be found under the groupid net.sf.ingenias in Maven Central. The main developer is escalope and the packages ought to be signed. If you know about Maven, you can already use the compoments there. There are archetypes for building INGENIAS projects. The relevant archetypes are: iafarch-empty: it creates an empty project iafarch-gui: it creates a project showing how an agent can interface with a GUI iafarch-helloworld: a basic example of an agent printing hello world iafarch-interaction: a more complex example involving interaction among agents as well...
  • 07 Nov 2012 Advices to work from eclipse

    To use INGENIAS from eclipse, version Juno and above that has the Maven plugin (m2e plugin), you just need to follow these steps: Go to the menu option file, then New, then Project Choose Maven Project, and then press Next Click Next in the following dialogue In the archetype selection dialog, write iaf in the filter, select the latest non SNAPSHOT version. Click on Next Write your project data, and press Finish Since INGENIAS has been ported to Maven, you should be able to compile the system and generate the code as if you were in command line. You can...
  • 07 Nov 2012 Sourceforge release of editors

    The use of Maven for development is not just for anyone. Though the mechanics are simple, it seems that developing from console is not just for everyone. Many people still prefer having something downloaded and then opening a GUI to start working. This is the reason why I have decided to, from time to time, release the editor as a regular self-contained jar file. The editor is just the modeling part of INGENIAS Development Kit. The editor will be available from sourceforge as a file which you can download. To use this editor, if your OS is prepared, it should...
  • 20 Oct 2012 Hello World demo part 1 of 2

    A demo for the hellow world. This demo illustrates how to use INGENIAS to create the Hello World example from scratch.

  • 15 Oct 2012 Changes in the editor and archetypes

    I have finished some videos on INGENIAS. It is the hello world example combined with the latest features: a new script structure which is more reliable than the maven-ant-plugin. This plugin has as a defect that it takes literal references to current jar files stored in .m2 folder. Usually, nothing happens, but, when you are working with snapshots, it is a mess. Also, it tries to download jar files into .m2 without using at all other maven files which tell maven which version to use, for example. As a result, the progran you run with ant (i.e., using the maven-ant-plugin)...
  • 26 Sep 2012 Experiences after a course on INGENIAS in Soria (Spain)

    Yesterday, I finished a course on INGENIAS in Soria for some companies. The experience tells first that Java is not that multi-platform. It is well known, but, from time to time, it is worth reminding it. Concretely, the following issues were detected: The paths. Paths in windows, specially in non-english languages, tend to have special characters. To prevent issues with XML, in our tools, those special characters are removed. This leads to undesirable behaviors, like converting an existing path to a string without troublesome characters but corresponding to a non existing path. Don’t bring your .m2 folder. It turns out...
  • 17 Sep 2012 INGENIAS goes to MAVEN

    INGENIAS has two versions at this moment. The old one is discontinued. For a time now, only the IDKMaven is being regularly updated The new one is based in Maven. There are important benefits in using Maven that makes worth the effort: Updates are instantly available for you. They can be automatic if you stick to the SNAPSHOT version (unstable) or be manual if you modify a file and change the version number. Maven does the rest, contacting the appropriate repositories and downloading the new versions. INGENIAS artefacts are uploaded to Maven repositories so they can be available worldwide. Besides,...