OAA 2.3.1 Source Distribution
	=============================

A (possibly) more up-to-date or more complete version of this file may be found here:
  http://www.ai.sri.com/oaa/distribution/v2.3/2.3.1/documentation.html#release

This file contains information regarding the "src" part of the
distribution.  Additional information about OAA can be found in the
other README files and on the OAA homepage, at
http://www.ai.sri.com/oaa.

This distribution provides the source code for all libraries,
tools and agents contained in the OAA 2.3 Runtime Distribution.

This source code distribution can be used in any of 3 ways:

(1) It can be used just as reference material; that is, for browsing
the code to understand OAA.

(2) It can be used to generate the OAA run-time distribution (using
the make files and build scripts included for this purpose.)  This
requires that certain prerequisites (compilers, etc.) have already
been installed on your system, to compile the java, C, and/or Prolog
libraries, and is likely to require a fair amount of effort in
understanding the build scripts, and configuring your system
appropriately.  This is *not* recommended for beginners.  In general,
it's easier to do under UNIX than Windows.  If you want to run OAA on
one of the platforms for which the prepackaged runtime distribution is
already available, please make use of that.

(3) It can be used as a framework, with examples, within which to
create new OAA agents.  This also requires certain prerequisites, but
should be considerably simpler than (2), because of the narrower
focus.  All OAA libraries needed for this purpose should be included
here, precompiled, in the source code distribution, for selected
platforms.  (That is, it should not be necessary for you to recompile
any OAA *library* source files on those platforms.) If you find this
not to be true for your situation, please let us know.

If you want to do (3), the easiest way to proceed might be to select
source code for one of the simpler existing agents, in your language
of choice, and then set up a source directory for your new agent,
which is parallel to that of the existing agent.

ORGANIZATION
============

Under UNIX, the intention is to have a Makefile at each level of the
source hierarchy, which can be used to build the subtree from that
location.  The command
  "make" (no arguments)
builds the OAA library into the lib hierarchy, and builds the
application programs into their local bin directories (that is, still
under the source hierarchy).  The command
  "make runtime"
can then be used to copy the necessary application files into the appropriate
places under the runtime hierarchy.

Under Windows, the process is less well-organized at present.

In future releases, we intend to provide better build automation, and
more complete notes on the build process, both for UNIX and Windows.

Java 2 (JDK 1.4 or 1.5, available at www.javasoft.com) must be used to compile 
all Java components, and we make the Prolog source code using both Quintus
Prolog and Sicstus Prolog.  In addition, if compiling Prolog code 
under Windows, you will need Microsoft Visual C++ v 6.0 (or later).

The C debug agent has a GUI based on the excellent 
free multi platform framework "fltk". We include all necessary 
files to recompile the debug agent (fltk.lib and the fltk header 
files), for a full documentation and information about fltk 
please refer to : www.fltk.org

We would welcome bug fixes or contributions to the source tree!
You may write to the user community at oaa-users@ai.sri.com, or
to SRI's OAA team, at oaa-staff@ai.sri.com.