We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.1.1 of JADE
As the version number indicates this is a minor release introducing small improvements and fixing few details. Instead, the main focus is on the documentation supporting the development of JADE-based applications for the Android Operating System. A brand new Tutorial has been made available describing how to address typical JADE-Android development issues such as activating the JADE runtime, starting agents and making them interact with Android GUI components (Activities). The tutorial makes reference to a minimal Chat Platform whose complete source code is available for download here
Furthermore, in order to facilitate the interactions between GUI components and agents inside an Android terminal the new Object-to-Agent (O2A) Interface API has been introduced. By means of this mechanism an agent can provide one or more application specific interfaces that can be retrieved and used by external components through the AgentController. Though designed for the Android Operating System the O2A Interface can be used in all situations where a Java program interacts with in-process JADE agents as exemplified in the classes of the examples.O2AInterface package included in the JADE examples distribution.
JADE 4.1.1 is expected to be fully backward compatible with previous versions.
JADE is distributed OPEN SOURCE by Telecom Italia S.p.A. under the terms of the LGPL Version 2 License and 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 5 of Java.