We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.5 of JADE and 3.6 of WADE.
As far as JADE is concerned a number of improvements and optimizations were introduced to better deal with situations where a lot of messages are exchanged between agents. In certain cases, such as sending a message to hundreds of receivers, delivery time was fastened by a factor of 10.
A major effort was dedicated to better integrating contributions from the Community into the JADE mainstream. Particularly important is the reorganization of the Inter Platform Mobility Service (IPMS) developed by the Universita Autonoma de Barcelona that is now available as a JADE Add-on.
As far as WADE is concerned this is mainly a consolidation version including bug fixes and optimizations as well as a reorganization and cleanup of library dependencies. Some new features were also introduced such as the possibility for an agent to terminate skipping the automatic restart mechanism of WADE achieved by invoking the setTerminating() method of the CAServices class just before Agent.doDelete().
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 4.5 and WADE 3.6 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 6 of Java.