The heart of building good distributed agent applications with the Cougaar Architecture is development of effective PlugIns.  A PlugIn captures in code the one piece of a business thread, and when linked with other pieces in the same or other agents, provides a simple but powerful method of representing business dynamic processes.  PlugIns can be anything from a simple sorting algorithm to complex expert rule systems, even interfaces to external databases and legacy systems.

The Cougaar Basic course walks a knowledgeable Java developer through the basic terminology, concepts, fundamental structures, and APIs for building PlugIns.  The course includes a number of exercises designed to allow students to test their understanding of the material.  The course assumes students have at least skimmed the PlugIn Developers Guide, and it helps to have that document handy during the exercise development periods.

The exercises are located in the 'doc/tutorial' component of the Cougaar release. You will need core.jar, glm.jar, and xerces.jar to run the exercises. Solutions to the exercises are provided as well, but you are on the honor system not to look until you have given it your best attempt.  The Basic Course Presentation material is 200 pages long, so you may want to work with it online or print it in sections.

There are also a number of simple example applications contained in the 'tutorial' component of the Cougaar release.  These include a number of toy problems and how they can solved using the Cougaar Architecture. 

Last Updated: 13 May 2002 (AHT)