Attention: This concept is not yet fully implemented. It is also considered to provide scriptable agents that can load scripts that define their actual behaviour. Various scripting languages are possible, like Ruby or SPL. It is still considered which is best suitable. A possibility would also be to provide more than one scripting language, like GBE::GRubyAgent and GBE::GSplAgent. Thus, more scripting languages are usable.

Agents are the parts of an element that define their behaviour. The behaviour of elements ultimately defines the physiology or the behaviour of the overall simulation created with the G System.

This makes agents a very important part of the G System. In particular agents are exactly what is used to customize the simulation to the needs of the particular usage. This also means that agents need to be created by people not directly developing the G System itself. To allow everyone to develop custom agents, a plugin architecture is used.

Agents can thus be developed independently of the G System Framework distribution. The plugin architecture takes care of dynamically loading agents into the simulation. It is even possible to update agents during runtime by unloading and reloading a particular plugin.

The GWE actually takes care of loading and creating GCS::GAgent objects from libraries. The responsible class is the GWE::GAgentPluginManager which implements dynamic library loading and plugin instantiation. Any kind of agents can be loaded this way.

The GWE::GAgentPluginManager class is also used by the GWE::GCoreXmlSerializer class to actually create agents specified by the XML document.

TO BE WRITTEN