[Repast-developer] RE: RePast and extensibity

[Nick C. <nic...@ve...>]

Charlie,

I'm afraid we never got very far with modularity, at least in the way you
are talking. That said, you should probably look at the PropertyDescriptor
class. Classes that extend this are used to present more complicated
properties and gui widget to the user. For example, the
ListPropertyDescriptor forces the user to choose from a limited list of
items. If you dig through the source code for that and related classes in
the uchicago.src.reflector package, that should help. There is also a how to
on property descriptors, I think.

Lastly, the ability to view agent and model properites was enhanced in
repast 3. I don't know much about that, but hopefully other developers on
the list (which I've cc'd) can help you there.

Nick

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charles Gieseler [mailto:cha...@cs...]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 11:36 AM
> To: Nick Collier
> Subject: Re: RePast and extensibity
>
>
> Hi Nick,
>
>     I'm not sure if you remember me, but I contacted you two months ago
> regarding a reinforcement learning package I am building for RePastJ. If
> you have time, I would like to ask you about a thread I ran across in
> the developer mailing list from 2003 discussing RePast and
> extensibility. Specifically, there was some discussion of building
> models from modular components. I was wondering if there has been any
> further discussion or development in this area. Are there existing
> interfaces or recommended practices for building modules? Are there any
> guidelines regarding what modules consist of or what they should do?
>
>     Most of my energy has been focused on building the learning
> components, but now I am at the point where I am integrating what I have
> into RePast. Thus far I have thought of my work as an add on "module"
> for RePast, but now I am uncertain that it is a module in the sense that
> has been discussed here previously. I was wondering if there were any
> standards that I should abide by if I am to construct a RePast module.
>
>     In addition I would be very interested to know if there are existing
> interfaces or classes for such modular components. Part of my package
> will include customized controls to manage learning settings from the
> RePast GUI. So far, this simply consists of extending Controller and
> adding a new tabbed pane to the simulation settings frame. However, I
> need to address issues of how to link these extended controls with
> learning components embedded in arbitrary models and agents. I would
> like to know if there are any existing module building structures that
> might helpful.
>
>     Any information you have would be much appreciated. I wasn't sure if
> this was appropriate to post to the developer mailing list, so I thought
> I would talk to you first. Thanks for you time.
>
> Best Regards,
>
>     Charlie Gieseler
>
> --
> Charles Gieseler
> Dept. of Computer Science
> Iowa State University
> Ames, IA 50011-1041
>
>