Agents and CPIA and 0.3 Release Goals

Attendees: KatieCappsParlante, StuartParmenter, ChaoLam, MitchKapor, AndyHertzfeld

Purpose

Clear, feasible, agreed upon goals for agents in the 0.3 release (where Stuart is the primary implementor). We needed to re-discuss this based on the current state of CPIA and chandler.

Conclusions

• Stuart will add example agents to ZaoBao.
• Stuart will own ZaoBao for the 0.3 release, including moving it to CPIA.
• ZaoBao is appropriate because it has a rich source of chandleresque data. The immediate advantage to working on a capplet outside of our primary capplets is to reduce dependencies on the design group -- Stuart can run with basic ui decisions to get something going.
• Stuart will create an Agent Block, which can be used in views and reveals some information about the current state of an agent.
• Stuart will create a simple Agent editor. Ideally, this editor would be constructed with CPIA blocks, or be a CPIA block itself. If this doesn't work out, it can be its own dialog, not using CPIA for the 0.3 release.

Notes

Other issues that came up in the meeting:

• We need to reconcile CPIA, the current ui work the design group is doing (basic chandler ui), and agents into one coherent design. The design group is actively working on this, as is the apps group. Katie and Chao are contact points.
• Katie will start thinking about logging/auditing. This feature will be important for agents, may or may not make it for 0.3.
• One of the issues to work out is how parcels/capplets might publish "behavior" or "actions" (e.g. "send mail"), and how this published behavior relates to Agent Actions. Andy originally conceived of Actions as being scripts that may wrap or call capplet "behaviors" in the form of published APIs, it may make sense to unify Actions with this notion of publishing a behavior. Katie owns following up on this issue.
• Parcels publish "capplets", "views", "agents", "schema", "behaviors" items in general, python code to back up the items, and other related files (images, etc.).

-- KatieCappsParlante - 26 Nov 2003