README

This is the April 4.4.x system

April is a programming system for developing distributed applications
in a high-level way; in particular for developing agent applications.

The complete system consists of April, DialoX and AdB.  Currently, we
are not able to release DialoX or AdB for general release, however, we
hope to do so soon.

April is made available under GPL 2.0 public licence. Please see the
file COPYING for the details.

If April has not been installed on your system, see INSTALL for
how to install April. Note that in order to compile and install April,
it is first necessary to build and install the ICM (Interagent
Communications Model) system.

The reference manual for April is included with the distribution. It
is called april.info, or april.html depending on how
you want to browse it. In addition, the April web site has a very
handy pocket guide to April.

In order to run April programs, you should run the communications
server on each machine that is going to use April. This version of
April uses the ICM as its communications system. ICM is documented
separately in the files icm.[ps, info, html]. To invoke the
communications server, just run icm:

% icm

This starts the commserver going. 

By default, the icm will immediately `detach itself' as a daemon, and
the icm command will return. Normally, it will not write any output to the
standard output, nor will it try to read any input. Any logging messages that
it generates are written to the file "/var/log/icm.log". Of course, this
reuires that you are root or have permission on the log file. To re-route the
log to another file, use:

% icm -L<file>

If you would like to see what it is doing, then try:

% icm -L-

this will dump the output from the communications onto stdout. When logging to
the console in this way, the icm will NOT detach itself as a daemon.

It is possible to arrange for logging output from the icm to go to the
standard logging handler -- as determined by syslogd. This is achieved by
running the icm with:

% icm -L+

Note that icm tends to generate a large amount of logging information, and you
may not wish to clog up the log in this way. In addition, you need to be root
to execute icm in this way.

The installation process creates the following programs in
/opt/april/bin:

	1) april
		The april run time system.  The options for this
		command are detailed in the Reference Manual.
	2) apc
		The april compiler.  This takes a filename to compile.
		Using the '-g' option compiles additional debugging
		information.
	3) apdebugger
		A very simple debugger server. Use it as an example of how to
		write a debugger rather than as a definitive debugger.

There is On-line documentation in /opt/april/info -- it is in the
form of a info file. This can be accessed using the info command:

% info -f /opt/april/info/april.info

to get on-line documentation for april. In Emacs (which is somewhat
better, especially within Emacs-19), use: ^U^Hi followed by the
appropriate file name.

If you have any queries, brickbats or comments, please e-mail me at:

fmccabe@gmail.com