JADE 4.3 and WADE 3.2 have been released

Dear JADE and WADE users,

We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.3 of JADE and 3.2 of WADE.

As far as JADE is concerned the main enhancement is the support for Virtual Replicated Agents i.e. virtual entities that are identified with a name (more precisely an AID), but do not correspond to concrete agents. On the other hand “behind” that name there are one or more concrete agents called the virtual agent Replicas. JADE takes care of dispatching messages directed to a Virtual Replicated Agent to a suitable concrete replica. It should be noticed that each replica agent has its own name that differs from that of the VR agent. A VR agent does not have a location while of course each replica agent runs on a well-defined container/host. This new feature is fully described in the
Virtual Replicated Agents Tutorial.
Moreover further improvements have been introduced in the Back-End Management Service that manages split containers using asynchronous I/O such as the possibility of setting a timeout (default or per-message) in the delivery of ACLMessages when the front-end is temporarily disconnected and a number of fixes to properly manage network problems.

As far as WADE and its graphical development environment WOLF are concerned a number of new features and enhancements have been added. The most important ones are i) the support for defining Components, i.e. workflows that can be easily reused as new activity types directly appearing in the Workflow Editor Palette, ii) a fully refactored Web Administration Console that supports user authentication and profiling, internationalization and new/improved administration features and iii) a brand new module called WadeInterface that allows administering the platform as well as launching and controlling workflows by means of a REST based interface.
Furthermore a new front-end for the Workflow-Driven Interactivity framework based on the GWT technology has been added. How to use it is described in the new tutorial Exploiting Interactive Workflows on GWT-based web applications.

As usual, a sensible effort was spent 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 and WADE.

JADE 4.3 and WADE 3.2 are expected to be fully backward compatible with previous versions.

JADE and WADE 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. 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.