Subject: Announcement: released JADE2.4"The LEAP of little JADE into the wireless world"
From: Bellifemine Fabio (Fabio.Bellifemine@telecomitalia.it)
Date: Wed Sep 26 2001 - 10:27:03 MET DST
Dear JADE users, we are pleased to announce the release of version 2.4
of JADE, release that we named "The LEAP of little JADE into the
wireless world".
At a functional level, the most important feature given by this new
release is the integration with the results of the EU IST-1999-10211
LEAP project (http://leap.crm-paris.com). The synergy between the JADE
platform and the LEAP libraries creates a FIPA-compliant agent platform
with reduced footprint and compatibility with mobile Java environments
down to J2ME-CLDC. The LEAP site provides instructions on how to
integrate these libraries with the JADE platform. A single homogeneous
view of the platform and set of API's is offered independently on the
Java environment ultimately allowing ubiquitous deployment of agent
services and applications. The JADE Team thanks the LEAP consortium for
their patient, professional, and effective collaboration giving such a
good result. One of the most challenging problem that had to be faced
was the removal of the dependency on the Java Collection Framework
(which is not available on J2ME run-time) while still preserving the
legacy and the existing applications of JADE users. In order to do that,
in this version we have deprecated a small number of JADE API's and
introduced a jade.util.leap package, kindly provided by the LEAP
consortium. J2SE users can of course continue to use the Java Collection
Framework, but J2ME users have to import this new JADE package.
Still at a functional level, it is worth to mention three more
modifications:
- David Bell, HP Labs, provided the code to allow JADE to use an
already-running RMIRegistry without any need to create a new private
registry
- the constraint that only Strings could be passed as arguments to an
Agent has been removed and it is now possible to pass an array of
Object, including an object reference, which makes straightforward
agent-to-object communication. In the next release, we intend also to
give an effective solution for the other way around, i.e.
object-to-agent communication
- a new couple of classes jade.proto.AchieveREInitiator/Responder
(Achieve Rational Effect) has been added that allows simple and
compositional implementation of all the FIPA-request like interaction
protocols that have been defined by FIPA, such as FIPA-request,
FIPA-query, FIPA-propose, FIPA-proxy, ...
Compliance to FIPA specifications has been further reinforced by fixing
a mistake that was the result of an oversight: 3 constants had a plural
name instead of a singular name, i.e. an extra "s" was added in the name
of the slots "ontologies", "languages", "protocols".
The JADE Team slightly increased, and we welcomed Federico Bergenti,
from the University of Parma. His first major contribution is the new
support for message content that has been also included in this version
of JADE, as implemented by the package jade.content. It is still in an
experimental phase but, in the long term, our intention is to replace
the current message content support (jade.onto) with the new one. In the
short term, we invite users to test and analyze it and provide us
feedback.
The community support is still strong and, thanks also to the help of
the users, a number of bugs has been fixed and a number of examples has
been added. The team has ideas to further improve this community support
but, in this case, we prefer to be pushed by the community rather than
drive and force some directions.
As usual, a complete and detailed lists of all the changes can be found
at http://jade.cselt.it/lastVersion/ChangeLog
Regarding backward compatibility, your applications should not be
impacted by this new release and no change should be needed apart from
some new warnings because of those methods which have been now
deprecated.
JADE 2.4 containers cannot join to JADE 2.3 containers and viceversa,
while inter-platform compatibility is guaranteed.
Our short term plans include better integration with Web technology
(e.g. JSP, Servlets, XML, ...) as well as security and multi-user
support in JADE.
JADE is distributed OPEN SOURCE by Telecom Italia (Telecom Italia S.p.A. changed the name
of the company in March) under the terms of the LGPL Version 2 License
and it can be downloaded at http://jade.cselt.it/ JADE (Java Agent
Development Framework) is a software framework that simplifies the
implementation of multi-agent systems through a middle-ware that
complies with the FIPA specifications and through a set of tools that
support the debugging and deployment phases. JADE has successfully
participated at the FIPA interoperability tests held in Seoul on January
1999 and in London on April 2001, and it has been extensively used
within a number of European projects. It is completely implemented in
Java language and the minimal software requirement is the version 1.2 of
Java.
Apologies for any duplicate emails received.
Sincerely, the JADE Team.
<<Fabio Bellifemine.vcf>>
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