We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.5 of JADE, release that we named “One Step Beyond”. We did in fact one step beyond trying to consolidate existing functionalities based also on the always welcome suggestions and feedbacks of the user community.
As usual, the ChangeLog on the web site reports the full list of modifications. The followings are the most relevant:
- Giovanni Caire made quite a number of improvements to the new support for content languages and ontologies (the package jade.content), including addition of the full SL content language, better documentation, simplified API and integration with the Protegè plug-in of Chris Van Aart, that we kindly thank for his contribution. This Protegè plug-in can be downloaded here. We have also submitted to FIPA this support for the specification of an abstract content representation.
- Support for corbaloc and corbaname style of addresses has been added in the IIOP-based MTP
- The HP team of Palo Alto is continuing to give great contributions. Among the others, they have added support for enhanced configuration files with environment variables and file inclusions.
- We have also added support for Object2Agent Communication such that an external object can communicate with an agent via the jade.wrapper package
- For the novice users who sometimes have problems in compiling the examples and setting the classpath, we have added a new ‘demo’ directory in the binary distribution of JADE with a jar file for a quick start of the MeetingScheduler demo.
Regarding backward compatibility, your applications should not be impacted by this new release and no change should be needed apart from some new warnings because of those methods and classes which have been now deprecated. JADE 2.5 containers cannot join to JADE 2.4 containers and viceversa, while inter-platform compatibility is always guaranteed.
The support for security and multi-user is under test and it will soon be released, stay tuned. Because of this still under-test support and because of on-going improvements to the messaging system, some very slight reduction of performance might have been introduced, however we are going to fix soon any such a reduction.
Our short term plans include better integration with Web technology (e.g. JSP, Servlets, XML, …) as well as support for persistence.
There is now space for listing your developments into the 3rd party sw contribution page. If you wished to be added, you should just contact Fabio.