We are pleased to announce the release of the version 3.3 of JADE that we named “Bridging the divide”.
The name of this release is related to the new Web Services Integration Gateway (WSIG) add-on, developed by Whitestein Technologies AG in the context of the JADE Board, that supports a seamless integration of two technologies (agents and web services) that are often perceived as competitors. By means of this add-on agents can search for Web services directly in the DF catalogue and invoke them as if they were provided by other agents. Similarly Web service clients can search for and invoke agent services hosted within JADE containers. Detailed documentation about the WSIG add-on is available on line while the add-on itself can be downloaded from the add-on area of the JADE web site.
Another important result achieved in this version by Profactor Produktionsforschungs GmbH and Telecom Italia LAB in the context of the JADE Board concerns the scalability of the platform. The new UDPNodeMonitoringService, described in chapter 2.3.6 of the administrator’s guide, allows deploying a platform with thousands of containers. The BEManagementService included in the LEAP add-on allows keeping more than 5000 back ends inside a single mediator container. Finally the mechanism to store the DF catalogue into a Data Base was sensibly improved to achieve faster search times.
As usual, a sensible effort was spent by Telecom Italia LAB in consolidating existing features, fixing bugs, and improving the documentation. 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.
Within the scope of the JADE Board, France Telecom is now focusing on the implementation of a semantic framework that will allow to fully exploit the semantics of FIPA ACL. The first official release of this framework is expected for mid 2005.
Last but not the least, we are migrating from CVS to Subversion, a new revision control system that will allow members of the community to create their own JADE-related projects under the supervision of the JADE Board. This is the first step in the direction of gathering the activities currently undertaken within the JADE community and making their outputs available to everybody in a uniform and consistent way.
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.
The JADE Board.