RE: Probes

[Fred Wan]

Hi,

In the Swarm user guide by Paul Johnson the following passage can be found:

There are two main uses for probes: they can be fed into data-collection
objects and serve as interfaces to the
objects about which data is being collected (thus keeping the
data-collection objects as general as possible) -
the Averager class, for example, directly subclasses MessageProbe. Or, they
can be used in order to
generate a GUI to the individual objects in the simulation (the more common
usage).


I did not notice the first way in which probes can be used in the examples
(but perhaps I overlooked it). In jheatbugs something like this is done with
EZGraphImpl. The average unhappiness is fed into a file instead of into a
display object. How can this best be done with output from probes, i.e.,
instead of feeding them into display objects, feeding them into other
(data-collection) objects or files? The advantage of probes is, that the
instance variables can directly be accessed, i.e., without intervenience of
an accessor (although that isn't exactly exemplary OOP practice).

Thanks,

Fred Wan.


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