Restrictions and Future Releases

 

Several restrictions apply to the current version of FM:

• Platforms. FM works exclusively under Solaris and Linux.
• "Centralized" Auction House. Though the auction itsef can be run in a distributed manner (each agent intermediary composing the market institution could be spawned in a different machine), the current version does not exploit this capability and thus runs the whole auction house on the same machine. Notice that this restriction has been solely motivated by our desire to keep things simple when possible.
• Bidding Protocols. FM  implements the Dutch bidding protocol
• Tournament Modes. Those modes involving sellers have not been included in this version.
• Database. FM  is prepared to be connected to a MySQL database.
• Local trace. FM  monitoring capabilities reduce to LAN tournaments.

The FM team is committed to delivering constant improvements to the FM software.

While the current version of FM is well-tested, the newer versions of FM available on our Web site tend to have better performance, improved scalability, more bug fixes, and occasionally, new features over older versions.

Many new features are currently under development for the forthcoming release, 1.0:

• Platforms. Support for Windows.
• Distributed Auction House. Possibility of distributing the agent intermediaries composing the auction house.
• Bidding Protocols. Implementation of FPBS, Vickrey and English.
• Tournament Modes. Inclusion of tournament modes involving sellers.
• Database. Possibility of selecting the database to connect to (oracle, mysql, informix, etc.) plus a built-in database browser.
• WWW Access. Possibility for human agents to participate through the web. This is currently possible if using a HotJava browser, but it is somewhat troublesome for Netscape since there is no full support for JDK1.1.