Agent Services live on your system or across your distributed platform, and are responsible for the life cycle, security, and behavior of your agent.
The Intelligent Agents console in iSeries™ Navigator requires that an agent platform be configured on your system, or across a distributed network. An agent platform is nothing more than a set of Java™ Virtual Machines, or agent pools, that run the services and agents of the platform. The platform is defined by a preferences file called ableplatform.preferences. This file lists the location (system and port) of each agent pool (JVM), the services that will run on or across the platform, and the agents that are allowed to run in the platform. If security is configured, the preferences file also lists the Kerberos user and service principals used to authenticate each service, agent, and user that is part of the platform.
Agent services, which can exist on any of the systems across your distributed platform, are responsible for the life cycle, security, and behavior of your agent. Agents running on the same system or distributed agents running across different systems use the defined set of platform services for different tasks such as getting a unique name, looking up other agents in a directory, logging, and passing messages to another agent.
The following services are made available to the agents running on or across a platform and to the users connected to the platform:
This service provides the creation of a globally unique name among all other pieces in the distributed platform. The naming service also provides security for the platform when security is turned on. Kerberos is used when starting the platform to authenticate all services, pools, and users. Throughout the life of the platform, this service also acts as the trusted third party to secure all interactions between the platform's agents, services, and users.
When an agent wants to make itself known to other services and agents across the platform, it creates an agent description and registers this description to the directory service. After the agent is registered, descriptions can be modified and removed.
This service is used to manage agents. Agents can be created, started, suspended, resumed, and destroyed through this service.
This service provides locators for parts of the platform. Interagent communication is also made available by this service.
A running agent may encounter a problem that requires outside intervention. The logging service creates and logs requests, and handles the corresponding answers that are sent back to it from the request. The progress of an agent can also be logged to this service for others to view.
The different services and jobs of the platform register their job entry to this service. This service provides critical information about the platform when the platform is running in the i5/OS® operating system.
Services and agents may use this service to save valuable information. The naming, directory, lifecycle, logging and job services can be backed up and stored in a database when the persistence service is configured.