BooksOnLine is intended to be an advanced tutorial for the COUGAAR infrastructure. It is a complete example of a COUGAAR-centric application, incorporating samples of many of the features available within the infrastructure. BooksOnLine emulates the functionality of an on-line book store such as Amazon, including web client interfaces for book orders. BooksOnLine shows what COUGAAR technology can add to a future on-line system by incorporating distributed, cooperating agent technology into the business process flow.
To “enjoy” the complete BooksOnLine experience, the reader should be an accomplished Java programmer. In addition, the reader should have some exposure to the COUGAAR architecture and API, either by reading the available documents, or (and preferably) by analyzing or working through the basic tutorials provided on the COUGAAR web site in the training section. The reader is assumed to have a practical knowledge of the actual COUGAAR method calls to create tasks, expansions, allocations, and assets.
The non-programmer, interested in the capabilities of COUGAAR , may still benefit from reading the “Story” section and looking at the User Interfaces (Appendix B and C) to see the functionality that has been developed in just this small demonstration system. Hopefully, this description of the scope of just one application that can be built using the COUGAAR architecture, will illustrate the power of the COUGAAR agent technology.
The BooksOnLine tutorial should teach you how to knit together all the pieces presented in the basic tutorials to form a cooperating, distributed COUGAAR society. Using the prototype COUGAAR seven step design methodology, the developer will be led through the design process in building an operating society.
The developer will also be shown how to use the generic PlugIns, either as-is or through extension, to leverage functionality already developed by the COUGAAR team. The following generic PlugIns are exemplified:
GenericTablePlugin
RandomOrgAllocatorPlugin
OrgRTDataPlugin
OrgReportPlugin
UTILLDMXmlPlugin
In addition to the integration of basic COUGAAR capabilities into a complete business process, many of the advanced features of the architecture are presented which are not included in the basic tutorials. These include:
Predictors
Triggers
Assessors
Persistence
Expanders
Aggregators
Allocators
Cougaar Servlet development
Execution monitoring and event generation
Custom Aspect Type definition
Reusable Asset allocations (dealing with role-schedules)