JADE 4.3.1, WADE 3.3 and AMUSE 0.9-alpha have been released

Dear JADE and WADE users,

We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.1 of JADE and 3.3 of WADE.

As far as JADE is concerned this can be considered mainly as a consolidation version with a set of minor improvements and bug fixes.
Concerning WADE and its graphical development environment Wolf on the other hand several noteworthy improvements have been introduced. The workflow deployment mechanism has been fully restructured and is now based on the notion of “Module”. A Module is a Jar file holding workflow classes and a proper Manifest and constitutes the minimal deployment unit: a module can be deployed, modified and undeployed without the need to shut the system down. At development time a module corresponds to a separated source folder so that there is no longer ambiguity related to the classes that are actually deployed at a given point in time. Wolf provides full support for creating, managing and deploying modules. Furthermore a new “Modules” section has been added in the WADE Administration Console to support modules management in a production environment.

The second important step forward regards “Components”. A Workflow can now be declared as a Component. The effect of this declaration is that a new item appears in the Wolf activity palette so that the workflow becomes immediately and easily reusable.
Finally the installation support provided by the Installer section of the WADE Administration Console has been cleaned and empowered. In particular the controlled environment can now be partitioned in different “host configurations” i.e. domains of hosts sharing the same WADE installation. Within a host configuration many WADE based systems (projects) can coexist sharing all or a subset of the hosts in the host configuration. New hosts can be added to a host configuration and project installations can be extended to hosts at will.

Last, but not least, we want to highlight the startup of a brand new project called AMUSE. AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User Social Environment) is a WADE-based software platform that facilitates the development of distributed social applications involving users that cooperate/compete to achieve common or private goals. Within this scope the primary focus of AMUSE is on multi player on-line games. As the version number (0.9-alpha) suggests, AMUSE is a very young project and suggestions, comments and contributions from the Community are very welcome to make it evolve.

As usual, a sensible effort was spent in consolidating existing features, fixing bugs, and improving the documentation. Refer to the ChangeLog files on the web site for the full list of changes and improvements in respect to the previous version of JADE and WADE.

JADE 4.3.1 and WADE 3.3 are expected to be fully backward compatible with previous versions.

JADE, WADE and AMUSE are distributed OPEN SOURCE by Telecom Italia S.p.A. under the terms of the LGPL Version 2 License and can be downloaded at 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. It is completely implemented in the Java language and the minimal software requirement is the version 6 of Java.

Apologies for any duplicate received.

The JADE Board.