Re: Announcement of new version 2.1 of JADE

Subject: Re: Announcement of new version 2.1 of JADE
From: Giovanni Rimassa (rimassa@ce.unipr.it)
Date: Tue Dec 19 2000 - 14:14:05 MET

Trucco Tiziana wrote:

> We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.1 of JADE.
>
> The most important changes are the following:
> - support for pluggable MTPs (Message Transport Protocols),
> - integration of ORBacus as an alternative implementation of the IIOP
> MTP (NOTICE THAT THIS IMPLEMENTATION HAS NOT YET COMPLETELY PASSED OUR
> TESTING PROCEDURE),

After a lot of head scratching (and some head banging against the wall ;-)
), I found what the problem with the ORBacus MTP
was.

The JADE 2.1 documentation says that you cannot use the ORBacus MTP and the
JDK 1.2 ORB MTP together in a single JVM, because
they have classes with the same name that are incompatible. However, you
should be able to use one of the two simply setting your CLASSPATH
to include only one among 'iiop.jar' (JDK ORB implementation) and
'iiopOB.jar' (ORBacus implementation).
The ORBacus MTP worked OK on my machine, in development configuration, but
failed in the testing configuration (using the JAR files we were about to
put
on the Web) with a 'java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError' error.
It looked like the JDK MTP was loaded even if the 'iiop.jar' JAR was not
set in the CLASSPATH.

If you take the binary distribution of JADE and look into the 'Manifest'
file for the 'jade.jar' archive, you find this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Class-Path: jadeTools.jar Base64.jar iiop.jar
Main-Class: jade.Boot

So, the problem is: the 'iiop.jar' archive was incorrectly put in the
'Class-Path' line of the manifest (really, it is a remnant of the previous
version
where the JDK ORB was the only supported ORB).

The good thing is: you can safely use the ORBacus MTP and JADE 2.1,
provided you do one of the following:

1) Edit the Manifest file from 'jade.jar' archive, removing the 'iiop.jar'
file from the 'Class-Path' line.
2) Delete or move in a different directory the 'iiop.jar' archive, so that
it is not in the same directory as 'jade.jar'.

Using the solution 2), I was even able to run the JDK ORB MTP on the main
container (using an IOR address), the ORBacus MTP
on a peripheral container (using a corbaloc address) together.

>
> - update to JESS 5.1,
> - passing of parameters to the Agent constructor,

<SNIP>

>
> - Integrated applet to control the DF GUI via Web
> - Added button to main GUIs to open a web browser to the JADE url.

Hope this helps,

    Giovanni Rimassa 

--
                 Giovanni Rimassa
     Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
         Universita` di Parma - Parma (ITALY)
    Phone: +39 0521 905712 -  Fax: +39 0521 905723
Trucco Tiziana wrote:
We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.1 of JADE.

The most important changes are the following:
- support for pluggable MTPs (Message Transport Protocols),
- integration of ORBacus as an alternative implementation of the IIOP
MTP (NOTICE THAT THIS IMPLEMENTATION HAS NOT YET COMPLETELY PASSED OUR
TESTING PROCEDURE),

After a lot of head scratching (and some head banging against the wall ;-) ), I found what the problem with the ORBacus MTP
was.

The JADE 2.1 documentation says that you cannot use the ORBacus MTP and the JDK 1.2 ORB MTP together in a single JVM, because
they have classes with the same name that are incompatible. However, you should be able to use one of the two simply setting your CLASSPATH
to include only one among 'iiop.jar' (JDK ORB implementation) and 'iiopOB.jar' (ORBacus implementation).
The ORBacus MTP worked OK on my machine, in development configuration, but failed in the testing configuration (using the JAR files we were about to put
on the Web) with a 'java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError' error.
It looked like the JDK MTP was loaded even if the 'iiop.jar' JAR was not set in the CLASSPATH.

If you take the binary distribution of JADE and look into the 'Manifest' file for the 'jade.jar' archive, you find this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Class-Path: jadeTools.jar Base64.jar iiop.jar
Main-Class: jade.Boot

So, the problem is: the 'iiop.jar' archive was incorrectly put in the 'Class-Path' line of the manifest (really, it is a remnant of the previous version
where the JDK ORB was the only supported ORB).

The good thing is: you can safely use the ORBacus MTP and JADE 2.1, provided you do one of the following:

1) Edit the Manifest file from 'jade.jar' archive, removing the 'iiop.jar' file from the 'Class-Path' line.
2) Delete or move in a different directory the 'iiop.jar' archive, so that it is not in the same directory as 'jade.jar'.
 

Using the solution 2), I was even able to run the JDK ORB MTP on the main container (using an IOR address), the ORBacus MTP
on a peripheral container (using a corbaloc address) together.

 
- update to JESS 5.1,
- passing of parameters to the Agent constructor,
<SNIP>
 
- Integrated applet to control the DF GUI via Web
- Added button to main GUIs to open a web browser to the JADE url.
Hope this helps,

    Giovanni Rimassa
  

-- 
                 Giovanni Rimassa
     Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
         Universita` di Parma - Parma (ITALY)
    Phone: +39 0521 905712 -  Fax: +39 0521 905723
 

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