Chapter 1 - Introduction

The Active Components project aims at providing programming and execution facilities for distributed and concurrent systems. The general idea is to consider systems to be composed of components acting as service providers and consumers. Hence, it is very similar to the Service Component Architecture (SCA) approach and extends it in the direction of agents. In contrast to SCA, components are always active entities, i.e. they posses autonomy with respect to what they do and when they perform actions making them akin to agents. In contrast to agents communication is preferably done using service invocations.

This user guide provides a detailed description of the available functionalities of Jadex Active Components. In particular, the following topics are covered in the upcoming chapters:

• Chapter 02 Active Components ](02%20Active%20Components) describes the underlying conceptual foundations.
• Chapter 03 Asynchronous Programming ](03%20Asynchronous%20Programming) gives an introduction to asynchronous methods using futures.
• Chapter 04 Component Specification ](04%20Component%20Specification) illustrates how services can be found and invoked.
• Chapter 05 Services ](05%20Services) explains how service invocations work.
• Chapter 06 Web Service Integration ](06%20Web%20Service%20Integration) describes how web services can be offered and used. 
• Chapter 07 Platform Awareness ](07%20Platform%20Awareness) explains how platforms can automatically find each other.
• Chapter 08 Security ](08%20Security) introduces the main security concepts of Jadex.
• Chapter 09 Auto Update ](09%20Auto%20Update) describes services for spawning new platforms and updating running platforms to new versions.