Step 1: Decide what kind of environment you want to build.

You first need to think about what kind of environment you want to build. Most importantly, you need to create an initial design of how you want agents to interact with the environment. What are agents supposed to be able to do in the environment? What do they need to know to be able to act in the environment?

If you already have a system you want to connect agents to, as often is the case, you need to look at the possibilities that system offers for agents to act intelligently in that environment.

Step 2: Create your own environment project.

Now you have decided what kind of environment project you want to build, you need to set up a code base for your project. Most often you will start with a code base that already exists and that you want to connect agents to. Throughout this guide we will assume that your code base conforms to the archetypical directory structure of a maven project. Nothing too much depends on the use of maven and you do not need to use the tool, if you do not want to, however.

You also want to share the environment you create with others and use some public version management system. We suggest to use git as it is also the tool we use for sharing environments on eishub. Download git here if you do not already have it installed. It is easy to turn your code base into a git project. Simply go to your project's directory and issue the command

 git init

In case you want to create an environment from scratch, think of a name you want your environment project to have, e.g., helloworld. The next step is to create the basic maven project structure for your code base by entering the following on the command line (we're assuming you will use Java to start with since EIS is Java based as well):

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes \
        -DgroupId=eishub -DartifactId=helloworld.

Now issue the git init command to make the directory a git repository and import the project into your favourite development environment, e.g., Eclipse or NetBeans.

Step 3: Add dependency on EIS library.

To be able to use the EIS framework, you need to make it available within your project. One option is to download the latest release which you should then include as a library in your project. But assuming that you are using maven, a better approach is to add the following sections to the pom file in your project:

<repositories>
  <repository>
     <id>eishub</id>
     <url>https://raw.github.com/eishub/mvn-repo/master/</url>
     <snapshots>
         <enabled>true</enabled>
         <updatePolicy>always</updatePolicy>
     </snapshots>
  </repository>
</repositories>

<dependency>
    <groupId>eishub</groupId>
    <artifactId>eis</artifactId>
    <version>0.4</version>
</dependency>

The first section informs maven about the repository where it can locate EIS. The second section informs maven which library is needed from that repository.