AgE 2.6 : Node start-up and command line arguments

An AgE node is started by a bootstrapper. Usually you will be using CliNodeBootsrapper — it allows one to start a separate node instance from the command line. However, sometimes you may need to create your own bootstrapper (e.g., to embed AgE into your application).

Standard Command-line Usage

The command-line-based bootstrapper is available as org.jage.platform.cli.CliNodeBootstrapper. Parameters it uses are dependent on the node configuration, but in the default configuration you usually need to provide:

• a node configuration file as the -Dage.node.conf parameter,
• a computation configuration file as the -Dage.computation.conf parameter.

The node configuration is required and describes capabilities of the node instance. The computation configuration should be provided only on one node in the distributed environment.

Resource specification

When specifying a resource to load by the platform (e.g., a configuration file in the age.node.conf option) it is possible to use different protocols.

Following protocols are available and recognised by default:

• classpath— for loading files from paths in the current classpath, e.g.:

  classpath:org/example/age.xml

• file— for absolute or relative paths in the filesystem, e.g.:

  file:/home/example/age.xml

• jar— for loading resources from a JAR file, e.g.:

  jar:file:/home/example/example.jar!/age.xml

• http[s], ftp— for loading remote resources using HTTP/HTTPS or FTP protocol, e.g.:

  http://example.com/age.xml

Other protocols may also be recognised if your Java runtime supports them.

Changing Default Behaviour

In some cases you may want to use a command line bootstrapper but provide configuration files in another way. CliNodeBootstrapper accepts an argument -m that overrides the standard name of the Lifecycle Manager.

java -cp $CLASSPATH org.jage.platform.cli.CliNodeBootstrapper -m my.own.LifecycleManager