2.2. Platform Settings

The settings dialog available from the "File" menu is used to set up diverse options for the Jadex platform and agent loading process. It is shown below in the Figure 2.2, “Platform settings dialog” and includes following options.

Expression evaluation.  Jadex provides several options how to evaluate the Java expressions contained in ADFs. The built in interpreter features fast loading times, but limited runtime performance, as the Java statements have to be interpreted on every access. The interpreter allows to restart plan classes, when they have changed. This allows to try out a change in the Java code without having to reload the platform. Note, that this feature should only used for debugging, as it slows down the system. The alternative to the interpreter is the online compiler based on Janino, which is available from the Jadex homepage as an add-on. In order to further speed up the process of agent loading and execution, the compiled expressions may be saved directly to a cache file. The options Write to file-cache enabled and Read from file-cache enabled activate this behaviour.

XML model loading.  The XML model loading section allows to influence how Jadex loads agent and capability models. When integrity checking is enabled all loaded agent and capability models are checked against a set of consistency rules (syntax of Java expressions, validity of cross references between goals and plans, etc.). The platform will refuse to start invalid agent models. The feature can be disabled to improve performance in deployed applications. To actually process the ADF and load the agent model, Jadex uses one of two XML-databinding frameworks. JiBX is a fast loader with a low memory footprint. To further improve performance the option to cache loaded models is available, which results in even faster loading times. JBind is a sophisticated mapping framework with the possibility to generate Java classes directly from the XML schema specification. Therefore JBind is the framework of choice for development purposes involving frequent changes to the XML schema.

Platform settings dialog

Figure 2.2. Platform settings dialog