JADE 4.3.3, WADE 3.4 and AMUSE 1.0 have been released

Dear JADE, WADE and AMUSE users,

We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.3.3 of JADE, 3.4 of WADE and 1.0 of AMUSE.

As far as JADE is concerned the main improvement consists in the new “Distribution Framework” included in the JadeMisc Add-on. This is a set of classes that facilitates the distribution/assignment of generic “items” to a given set of target agents. The framework provides all the basic mechanisms (e.g. maintaining the list of target agents up to date, keeping track of current assignments or detecting and reacting to agents’ faults) and allows developers to specify application specific logics according to their needs by redefining suitable methods. More details can be found in the Javadoc of the jade.distribution.AssignmentManager class.

Concerning WADE (the extension of JADE that enables creating agents’ tasks as workflows) a number of new important features were added to the Administration Console including remote management of the Main Container, facilitated configuration files editing and agent attributes inspection and management. Furthermore the new version of Wolf (WADE graphical development environment) provides a flexible support to tailor the content of a project installation package including the possibility of managing different target environments (e.g. development and production environments) as well as splitting project classes into different jar files.

The most relevant point in this release, however, concerns AMUSE whose first official version is finally available. 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. Unlike its former experimental version, AMUSE is now sufficiently stable and supports several features such as
User Management – Registration and authentication of application users as well as a minimal support for managing user profiles in the form of a set of application specific properties.
Clock synchronization – Raw synchronization of application clients running on different terminals to allow performing actions at the same time (particularly important for real-time games)
Peer-to-peer match coordination – Fully decentralized support for organization and playing of one-to-one matches based on the invitation metaphor.
Centralized match coordination – Supports for the organization of matches involving 2 or more players based on the table metaphor.
A complete game is also available to exemplify how to exploit AMUSE to develop multi-player games and a brand new Tutorial is provided explaining its code.

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 versions of JADE and WADE.

JADE 4.3.3 and WADE 3.4 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 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. 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.