Title (All Applicants)
Migrating Behavior Search’s User Interface from Swing to JavaFX
Project Advisor(s) (Students Only)
Dr. Forrest Stonedahl
Presentation Type (All Applicants)
Poster Presentation
Disciplines (All Applicants)
Business Administration, Management, and Operations | Computer Sciences
Description, Abstract, or Artist's Statement
Agent-based models (ABMs) is a genre of computer modeling that simulates actions and interactions between individual entities (agents). ABM is widely used to simulate behavior in many fields, including biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, economics, and social science. NetLogo is a well-known agent-based programming language that provides a powerful platform to build and examine ABMs. However, to fully analyze a model one must run the model many times with different parameters, which can be a very daunting task. Therefore, Dr. Forrest Stonedahl developed BehaviorSearch, a software tool to help with automating the exploration of ABMs. The software interfaces with the NetLogo platform and allows the client to search for combinations of model parameter settings that will result in a specified target behavior. The earlier version of BehaviorSearch uses the Swing UI library for its user interface, which has several disadvantages including: 1) Graphical components and controlling methods are embedded in the same code, which makes the code really long and hard to debug. 2) The interface's style is dated back to Window 2000. 3) Swing doesn’t support displaying charts inherently. 4) Application doesn’t scale well to modern high-resolution screens. My project focused on migrating the user interface to the JavaFX library, which fixed all of the problems listed above. JavaFX allows the separation of graphical component into an .FXML file. It also supports CSS3 styling and chart display. Overall, this project modernized the look and feel of the BehaviorSearch program and improved its compatibility with newer hardware.
Augustana Digital Commons Citation
Nguyen Dang, An. "Migrating Behavior Search’s User Interface from Swing to JavaFX" (2017). Celebration of Learning.
https://digitalcommons.augustana.edu/celebrationoflearning/2017/posters/10
Migrating Behavior Search’s User Interface from Swing to JavaFX
Agent-based models (ABMs) is a genre of computer modeling that simulates actions and interactions between individual entities (agents). ABM is widely used to simulate behavior in many fields, including biology, ecology, chemistry, physics, economics, and social science. NetLogo is a well-known agent-based programming language that provides a powerful platform to build and examine ABMs. However, to fully analyze a model one must run the model many times with different parameters, which can be a very daunting task. Therefore, Dr. Forrest Stonedahl developed BehaviorSearch, a software tool to help with automating the exploration of ABMs. The software interfaces with the NetLogo platform and allows the client to search for combinations of model parameter settings that will result in a specified target behavior. The earlier version of BehaviorSearch uses the Swing UI library for its user interface, which has several disadvantages including: 1) Graphical components and controlling methods are embedded in the same code, which makes the code really long and hard to debug. 2) The interface's style is dated back to Window 2000. 3) Swing doesn’t support displaying charts inherently. 4) Application doesn’t scale well to modern high-resolution screens. My project focused on migrating the user interface to the JavaFX library, which fixed all of the problems listed above. JavaFX allows the separation of graphical component into an .FXML file. It also supports CSS3 styling and chart display. Overall, this project modernized the look and feel of the BehaviorSearch program and improved its compatibility with newer hardware.