The Jadex Control Center (JCC) represents the main access point for all available Jadex runtime tools. The JCC itself provides its functionalities via plugins and is therefore quite easily extensible. Currently the following plugins are shipped with the standard distribution of Jadex: Starter, Introspector, Conversation Center, and Tracer. Each tool provides its own perspective in the JCC and is described in subsequent chapters.
Main aspect of the JCC is the project handling. A project is used to store user
settings made in the JCC itself (ike window sizes or user settings) and the settings
from the various plugins. Project files consist of a main project file (ending ".jpr"
for Jadex project) and additional property files for each plugin.
In addition, the JCC uses a startup configuration, taken from the file
jcc.properties
which is by default located in the user Jadex
configuration directory (%USERPROFILE%/jadex
on
MS Windows™, $HOME/.jadex
on
other operating systems). This properties contain a list of used plugins as well as a
pointer to the last project the user worked with. At the launch time of JCC the last
project will be automatically reopened.
The Control Center is realized as Jadex agent
jadex/tools/jcc/JCC.agent.xml
and is started per default
when the Standalone platform is launched. To prevent the Control Center being
started the -nogui
option can be used for the Standalone
platform. Using other adapters the Control Center can be launched by simply starting
the corresponding JCC agent mentioned above.
The "File" menu provides options for loading/saving the current project settings. In addition, the currently opened project name is displayed in the JCC window's title bar (see Figure 2.1, “JCC window”). The "File/Settings" menu item allows to open the platform settings dialog described in Section 2.2, “Platform Settings”. The "File/Exit" menu item allows to close the GUI and kill the JCC agent, and optionally shutdown the whole platform. The "Help" menu provides access to the Jadex help system and the Jadex homepage.
The buttons at the right side of the toolbar allow to switch between the
perspectives provided by the plugins (starter, introspector, conversation
center, and tracer).
The buttons on the left as well as all menus except "File" and
"Help" are dependent on the selected perspective and will be described there.