Version 3.1 of JADE has been released

We are pleased to announce the release of the version 3.1 of JADE that we named
MAIN TOLERANCE.

Together with the release of JADE3.1 we are also pleased to announce the new,
completely restyled, web site including a new logo for the project.

Notice that now a password is needed in order to access the most important areas of the Web site. The password can be requested via the web site itself and it is the same password of the mailing lists that you should have received recently.

The name of this release indicates that, unlike previous ones, it ADDS CAPABILITY
OF FAULT TOLERANCE OF THE MAIN CONTAINER. The new Main Replication Service allows
in fact to start one (or more) “backup” Main Container that automatically
detects a fault of the “master” Main Container and takes over from
it in a completely transparent way.
Another important achievement in this version concerns the internals of JADE:
the kernel was partially re-designed and structured as a collection of pluggable
services distributed across the nodes (the containers) of the platform. This
new architecture does not have a direct impact on the applications, but enables
the implementation of new features (persistency, message signature and encryption
are under development) as separate services that can be activated or not according
to the user needs.
A number of other improvements were also introduced among which new MTPs for
FIPA compliant inter-platform communication (in particular an highly efficient
and scalable HTTP MTP kindly provided by Joan Ametller and Sergi Robles from
University of Barcelona), new interaction protocols implementations, a flexible
store and forward mechanism to buffer ACL messages whose intended receiver is
currently missing and several bug fixes. 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.
Last but not the least a strong effort was spent on improving the documentation
and in particular restyled Javadoc API, new tutorials (including the official
“JADE-programming Tutorial for Beginners”), and revisited examples
are now available.

Important notes:
1) JADE3.1 ruquires JDK1.4 or later to run.
2) We regret to say that JADE3.1 doesn’t support JADE-S (the add-on for security).
A new, more powerful, flexible and easy-to-use version is currently under developement
and is planned for March 2004.

JADE is distributed OPEN SOURCE by TILAB (formerly CSELT S.p.A.) under the
terms of the LGPL Version 2 License and it 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
1.4 of Java.