Dear JADE users,
we are pleased to announce the release of the version 3.2 of JADE.
This version includes the new security add-on: JADE-S version 2, developed by the JADE Board. JADE-S provides security features and multi-user support in multi agent systems. This version has been
completely rewritten according to the new JADE kernel services model, and it completely replaces the first security add-on (JADE-S version 1) distributed with version 2.61 of JADE. Now security is available through
four services: Security, Permission, Signature and Encryption. With respect to its previous version, JADE-S Version 2 provides additional features such as end-to-end message signature and
encryption, fixes a number of bugs and is compatible with the LEAP add-on, which allows running JADE agents on mobile phones. Several features
are still missing in this new release, like mobility and usage by agents of delegated permissions, but they will be addressed in the next
versions. Detailed documentation about the Security plug-in is available on line while the plug-in itself can be downloaded from the add-on area of the JADE web
site. Some working examples are included into the add-on.
As usual, thanks also to the cooperation of several members of the JADE community, we invested effort for consolidating existing features, fixing bugs, and improving the documentation. Further to the security
add-on, this new release includes the following main new features and improvements:
- a ThreadedBehaviour was added, a behaviour that is executed in itw own thread of execution
- the logging support is now based upon java.util.logging. A new tool, the LoggerManager, launchable by the RMA GUI, allows modifing the logging level at run-time on a
per-class basis - HTTP is now the default Message Transport Protocol instead of IIOP (Joan Amedtler)
- We added support for RMI over SSL
- Denso IT Labs helped us in adding support for transporting
multi-byte
charset. Notice that it requires using a newer version of JavaCC
(version 3.2) - We added the Persistence Service with support for agent save, load,
reload, freeze and thaw on relational database. The PersistenceService
is based on Hybernate and is included in the Persistence add-on. - We released the Test Suite Framework as a new add-on of JADE
- Chris Van Aart helped in improving the Protege bean-generator by
adding support for OWL.
Refer to the ChangeLog file on the web site for the full list
of changes
and improvements in respect to the previous version of JADE.
Apart from the security add-on, that has been completely
redesigned, we
do not expect major backward incompatibilities: the ChangeLog
reports a
very short list of possible minor backward incompatibilities, quite
trivial to fix on your application-code.
JADE is distributed OPEN SOURCE by TILAB (formerly CSELT S.p.A.) under
the terms of the LGPL Version 2 License and it can be downloaded at
https://jade.tilab.com/. 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 1.4 of Java.