JADE 3.4 Released

We are pleased to announce the release of the version 3.4 of JADE that we named “Towards Intelligent Agents”.
The name of this release is related to the new Semantic Framework add-on, developed by France Telecom in the context of the JADE Board, that allows exploiting the formal semantics of FIPA ACL. This add-on makes it possible for developers to get rid of all logic dealing with how to react to incoming messages (e.g. whether to agree or refuse a requested action) and represents the first step in the roadmap of enriching the “intelligent” part of JADE agents. The new 1.2 version of this add-on is now compliant with the pJava profile and significantly improves the belief base (performances and query expressiveness). Another major improvement in this release is the new Migration Service developed by the Universita` Autonoma de Barcelona that allows agents migrating across different JADE platforms. This service has been designed to integrate as seamlessly as possible with the existing intra-platform mobility support. By simply specifying a PlatformID instead of a ContainerID as destination in the doMove() method, an agent can now move to a remote platform instead of a remote Container.
Other noteworthy improvements concern the DF that now supports notifications of de-registrations, the possibility of activating agents from separate jar files and the new FaultRecovery service. The latter (only available in the JADE-LEAP version at present) was introduced to deal with Main Container faults in situations where the existing MainReplication service is not appropriate (e.g. a loss of power that causes all replicated Main Containers to terminate at the same time).
This service keeps track of all existing containers in a persistent storage. If the Main Container crashes and successively recovers it contacts all existing containers and asks them to re-synchronize.
As usual, a sensible effort was spent in consolidating existing features, fixing bugs, and improving the documentation. New add-ons have been developed and made available by the community such as the Jabber MTP, the Untraceability service and a new version of the ASCML. 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.

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.