11.07.2001
Version 2.3 of JADE released

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.3 of JADE as well as the full migration to the new domain jade.cselt.it. Two major features have been added into JADE 2.3:

  • the so-called "Introspector Agent", a useful tool for debugging the internal state of an agent, in particular monitoring the agent's life-cycle and the exchanged ACL messages. It can be launched from the main graphical console, the RMA GUI.
  • the InProcessInterface, a wrapper of the higher-level functionalities that allows external applications to launch JADE, containers, as well as agents. Read chapter X.Y of the programmer's guide and the new "inprocess" example in the "examples" subdirectory.
A number of other features have also been integrated and most reported bugs have also been fixed. As usual, we also integrated contributions from the user community, that we wish to thank and acknowledge. The most relevant are the following:
  • the example of three-way integration Jade-Jess-Protege, kindly provided by Oliver Hoffmann;
  • the drag and drop functionality on the RMA and the ACLGUI panels, kindly provided by David Bell (HP Palo Alto); 
  • the SLFormatter tool (jade.tools.sl.SLFormatter) that allows to format an SL-expression into a human-friendly string (Craig Sayers, HP)
Look at ChangeLog for a detailed list of all the changes. 
Your applications should not be impacted by this new release and no change should be needed apart from a couple of warnings because of few methods which have been now deprecated.  In particular, take care when using the class jade.core.AID because it can now just represent globally unique identifiers (GUID) and it does not allow any more the usage of local names. Correct usages of the AID constructor are now:
AID aid = new AID("da0", AID.ISLOCALNAME)
AID aid = new AID("da0@sharon.cselt.it:1099/JADE", AID.ISGUID).
The same care should be taken when using the AID GUI that now includes a checkbox that must be selected in order to indicate local names, rather than GUIDs.
The short term future plans are strongly focused on the integration with the results of the LEAP project such that agents can soon (possibly in 3 months from now) be executed on micro-devices without any change on the API. Also we are improving the content language and the ontology support which is currently quite weak.
Medium term plans include better integration with Web technology (e.g. JSP, Servlets, XML, ...) as well as security and multi-user support in JADE.