JADE 2.61 “Along the Secure Way” released

The main changes with respect to previous versions are related to the inclusion of JADE-S the new Security plug-in developed by the JADE team and in particular by Michele Tomaiuolo and Giosue` Vitaglione. By means of this plug-in a JADE platform becomes a multi-user system where each agent is owned by a user. The system administrator can give permissions to users and to specific agents (otherwise an agent inherits the permissions given to the user who owns it) for executing actions such as creating/killing other agents or moving to a given container. The platform will check these permissions and prevent all non authorized actions by leveraging the security mechanisms provided by JDK1.4.

Detailed documentation
about the Security plug-in
is available on line while the
plug-in itself
can be downloaded fron the add-on area of the JADE web site.

Other noteworthy improvements regard:
– The Introspector Agent that was modified to support “step-by-step” execution of introspected agents (where each step corresponds to the execution of the action() method of the currently scheduled behaviour)
– The build process to compile JADE, the examples and all the add-ons that is now based on ANT, a well known Java based build tool, freely available from
from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant.
As usual, the ChangeLog file
on the web site reports the full list of modifications.