OAA® Documentation and
Distribution
General Documentation
This section lists some high-level documentation that should help you
understand OAA and the concepts of delegated computing.
Technical documentation (e.g., a Developer's Guide) is provided
in the distribution pages.
OAA 2.3.2 Distribution and Documentation
The OAA 2.3.2 distribution provides binaries and source code for all
agent libraries, the facilitator, a number of tools and a sample
application composed of several agents.
Starting with version 2.3.2, OAA is
released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Earlier Releases of OAA 2
OAA 1.0 Distribution and Documentation
OAA 2 capabilities and design embody significant changes and improvements over OAA 1.0, and OAA 2 is better documented
and supported. However, OAA 1.0 does provide libraries for more programming
languages, so if you are willing to live with all the caveats version 1.0
comes with, you are welcome to make use of it.
The OAA 2.x Facilitator provides backward compatibility
such that OAA 1.0 and OAA 2.x agents can co-exist under an OAA 2.x
Facilitator. (Note that for backwards compatibility, it is necessary to use the 2.x Quintus-generated
facilitator. For more on this, see doc/README_RUNTIME.txt in the current distribution.)
- ACCESS the OAA 1.0
Distribution Pages.
General Documentation
These materials contain high-level documentation that should help you
understand OAA and the concepts of delegated computing.
Release-specific technical documentation (e.g., a Developer's Guide) is provided
in the distribution pages, which can be accessed using the links given above.
Technical Whitepaper
This whitepaper outlines the vision of the Open Agent Architecture
and "Delegated Computing." This is also a good document to see for a
comparison of OAA and other distributed technologies.
The whitepaper is available in
HTML form.
What's new in OAA 2?
This document provides a brief overview of the improvements
that have been made in OAA 2 compared with version 1.0.
This document is available in HTML
form.
OAA Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
The FAQ contains general questions and answers about the Open
Agent Architecture.
The FAQ is available only in
HTML form.
OAA 2 Papers
The most comprehensive paper to date provides a detailed look at OAA
2, its motivations, and some applications:
- D. L. Martin, A. J. Cheyer, and D. B. Moran,
"The Open Agent Architecture: A framework for building distributed
software systems,"
Applied Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal. Volume 13,
Number 1-2, January-March 1999. pp 91-128.
This paper is available in
[HTML], PDF (400K), and
GNU-compressed PostScript.
Other papers may be accessed by clicking here (same as the Publications link in the left frame).
OAA Presentation Slides
OAA Videos
The following videos show OAA in action, and may contribute to your
understanding about how OAA is different from other distributed
infrastructures.
Copyright 1999 - 2002, SRI International.