Platforms#

An agent has to interact with the users through some communication channel. BAF’s platforms wrap all the necessary code to build the connection between the agent and a communication channel.

All platforms implement the abstract class Platform. It defines the methods any platform must have. So, if you would like to create your own platform (and contribute to the BAF development 🙂), it must implement them according to the platform needs:

  • initialize(): Initialize the platform. It is called internally when you run the agent (Agent.run()). You may need to set some things previously to the platform execution.

  • start(): Start the platform execution. It is called internally when you run the agent (Agent.run()).

  • stop(): Stop the platform. It is called internally when you stop the agent (Agent.stop()).

  • _send(): Send a payload (usually a message) to the user. This is a private method. It is called internally by other platform methods, such as the following one.

  • reply(): Send a textual message to the user.

Additionally, a platform could have specific methods for it, as you can see in our implemented platforms.

Session persistence#

BAF already persists user sessions at the backend level, so restarting an agent brings every user back to the last state with their stored parameters intact. However, the client UI must authenticate the user so the platform can map the incoming connection to the correct session.

  • Telegram ships with its own user authentication, so persistence works out of the box as soon as you configure the Telegram platform. See Telegram platform for setup details.

  • WebSocket + Streamlit UI includes a built-in login page that tags each browser session with a username before opening the socket. Learn how to enable persistence in WebSocket platform.

  • Custom WebSocket interfaces must implement the same identification protocol (authenticate the user and include the user identifier in each message) so the agent can reuse the persisted session. Follow the guidelines in WebSocket platform if you plan to build your own frontend on top of the WebSocket API.

Table of contents#