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 restart the platform. Note, that this feature should only be used for debugging, as it slows down the system. The alternative to the interpreter is the on-the-fly 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 behavior.

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. Furthermore it can be determined if model caching should be used. In case it is enabled Jadex will load a model only once from an XML file and will afterwards use a master Java model from which new model instances are cloned. With the auto-refresh option it can be specified if Jadex should always check the timeliness of the files. When turned off files will always be loaded from cache regardless of their timeliness.

Generic settings.  The gereric settings allow for customizing several minor platform features. If the welcome message printed to the console shortly after start-up is unwanted it can be turned off here. Additionally the exit behaviour can be specified. The default behaviour when closing the JCC user interface is that the user is asked if he wishes to shutdown the platform also. To avoid this prompting it can be set to automatically shutdown the platform or keep it alive without asking.

Platform settings dialog

Figure 2.2. Platform settings dialog