Role

The Incoming Mail Box (aka InBox) provides Zeus agents with their primary means of communication with the outside world. By default Zeus agents communicate by exchanging ACSII formated messages through TCP/IP sockets, this lightweight mechanism has been deliberately chosen in preference to more complex RMI or CORBA mechanisms, which may have required additional software to be installed. (Although as the InBox and OutBox encapsulate the communication mechanism it would be possible to replace it with an alternative, although this could restrict compatibility with other agents).

Display

The Inbox window consists of a table whose rows represent the last 10 incoming messages to be received. The following information is shown:

• Sender - the name of the agent that dispatched the message
• Subject - a summary of the content of the message
• Type - the performative type of the message