IberAgents Development Status

This document details features planned for inclusion in IberAgents, prioritized by importance.

Introduction

With more than 24,000 lines of Java code (excluding blanks), IberAgents is growing to be a complex piece of software. At this point its developers must be careful when adding some new functionality, so that feature bloat does not make it overly complex. The essential goal of simplicity for users is (and has to be) its strongest point.

Yet many features are desirable while adding little or no additional complexity for those users not using it. As time allows, IberAgents developers plan to add them according to their stated priority. As they are developed, they will be marked as so in this document.

Online documentation for architecture and features are available, along with a user guide.

Prioritized Features

The order in which a feature appears in each category indicates its importance; ideally, they would be developed as they are shown.

Maximum Priority

Below are those tasks that have to be finished for some essential feature to work properly.

List pagination: show lists some items at a time, including links that allow the user to go back and forth.

Medium Priority

These are important features, but not critical for any current applications.

Persistence history: store several versions of the same object as it is modified, allow the retrieval of an old version.
SOAP interoperability: interoperate with common SOAP implementations. Limited support is available now.
Component management: add a monitor for restartable components, separate from agents.

Long Term Priority

These are features that would be nice, but do not require immediate attention.

User management: add an administration interface to add / edit / remove users.
XSL inclusion: allow XSL files to be included in other XSL files.

Features Completed

These features have already been completed.

SOAP faults: implement creation and reception of SOAP faults, and map them to platform exceptions. Added in v1.1.2.
List support: finish implementation of lists, allowing adding and removing list elements. Added in v1.2.
Secure login: do not send password as cleartext, but use a hash for verification. Added in v1.3.

Known bugs

Bugs listed here are outstanding.

Certificate loading and memory: On some machines, enabling the CertificateManager component takes up a lot of memory and consumes 100% CPU for a minute. Workaround: disable certificate loading in its preferences.