Agent Building and Learning Environment

## Agent Editor for Eclipse

The ABLE Agent Editor for Eclipse provides the ability to populate agent containers with inter-connected beans. It can drag/drop beans and agents onto an agent. It provides a context menu from which you can open a Swing inspector on beans and agents, open Swing Customizers on beans and agents, run the container agents Step/Cycle/Run/Halt, import or export an agent or bean from or to a serialized file, initialize an agent, and set certain properties using Eclipse property sheet. When an Agent is selected, the Step/Cycle/Run/Halt buttons on the toolbar are activated and work like in the Swing agent editor.

A wizard to create an Agent is available at New->ABLE->Able Agent.

### Installation

The ABLE Agent Editor is installed as part of the ABLE feature. The ABLE feature is installed by unzipping it into your `eclipse` directory such as:
`C:\eclipse`.

Use Eclipse 3.0 which can be obtained at Eclipse.org or Rational Application Developer 6.0 which can be obtained from downloads or by IBM personnel at Jumpstart.

### Functions

The ABLE Agent Editor plugin consists of a custom editor for files of extension .agent. It requires the org.eclipse.gef plugin which is included with Eclipse as of 3.0. In Eclipse 2.1 GEF had to be installed and downloaded separately.

- The ABLE Agent Editor provides a canvas for placement and connection of ABLE beans.