We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.4 of JADE, 3.5 of WADE and 1.5 of AMUSE.
As far as JADE is concerned the Messaging Service was improved adding the support for bulk delivery. That is, when the system is overloaded due to a lot of messages exchanged by agents, the Messaging Service starts delivering messages in blocks instead of one-by-one thus improving the performances up to a factor of 10. Bulk delivery is managed automatically by the Messaging Service and is fully transparent to developers.
Moreover new classes were added to the JADE Library to further simplify the development of typical patterns. The ActionExecutor
class in particular allows creating behaviours requesting the execution of an action and getting back the result, if any, with really a few lines of code.
As far as WADE is concerned, the main improvements included in this release focus on management of unexpected problems. More in details a better mechanism was introduced to deal with an OutOfMemory error in a container JVM. The error is now immediately detected by the BootDaemon that (if configured to do so) kills the container process thus activating the usual WADE fault tolerance mechanisms. The latter are responsible for restarting the container with all its agents on top.
Noteworthy improvements were also introduced in the WADE Administration Console and in WOLF, the Graphical development environment of WADE. In particular the installation package creation function was enriched to allow automatically including external elements such as jar files produced by the compilation of external projects.
Finally concerning the AMUSE project this release includes important new features and a lot of fixes that make it extremely more robust and suitable to create real online multi-player games.
In particular we mention the possibility of accessing a dedicated MongoDB database to persist game specific information in the server-side part of the game, the support for using Facebook or Google+ accounts to authenticate and a number of additional options in the GamesRoomFeature to manage matches based on the “Table” metaphor.
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, WADE and AMUSE.
JADE 4.4, WADE 3.5 and AMUSE 1.5 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.