[Repast-developer] Default "empty" constructors for Controllers.

[Mark R. D. <mdi...@la...>]

Nick,

Is it possible to also enforce some rules that IControllers need to 
support at least an empty constructor for "Beanish" related 
capabilities? This is an issue because, while BaseController does have 
an empty constructor, it isn't automatically available to classes that 
extend it.

The reason I suggest this is that having an empty constructor and 
get/set methods provides for a clean separation between the creating of 
an object and its "configuration", something that is valuable in other 
areas of repast such as constructing models and then setting the model's 
properties. As well, for my work in jelly to be extensible (and easier 
to code) it would be benifical to have empty constructors available for 
the construction of IControllers.

This constructor issue can be seen in both BatchController and 
ThinController.


-Mark

>> Hi,
>>
>> The new IController interface defines methods for executing (starting,
>> stopping etc.) a simulation. The BaseController implements this
>> Interface in an asynchronous way, that is, it creates a thread and
>> executes scheduled actions in this thread. Start, stop etc. merely
>> (oversimplifying a bit) start and stop this thread. The batch controller
>> and gui controller add parameter handling on top of this. A new
>> controller, Thin Controller, adds a bit more that is necessary for a
>> non-abstract controller, but it still relies on BaseController to set up
>> the thread.
>>
>> So, if you want a controller that not so asynchronous then what repast
>> supplies won't work. However, it would be fairly easy to construct such
>> a thing using BaseController as a model. In fact it sounds like all you
>> want is to create a Schedule add actions to it for execution and then
>> iterate over the Schedule calling execute some number of times. Again,
>> looking at the code in Schedule and ScheduleBase would might help you
>> out here.