dc.description.abstract | Agent and multiagent technology has been the subject of many discussions within the scientific
community, but it is maybe only recent that it has seen significant degree of exploitation in
many types of application, including accounting application.
The initial software developments, that later became the JADE (Java Agent Development
Framework) platform, were started by Telecom Italia in 1998, motivated by the need to validate
the FIPA specifications. JADE went open source in 2000. JADE has a website1 from where the
software, documentation, example code, and a wealth of information about usages of JADE
are available. The project welcomes the participation of the open source community with a
variety of means to become involved and contribute to the project. In order to facilitate
industrial involvement, in 2003 was defined a collaboration agreement and formed the JADE
Governing Board, a not–for–profit organization of companies committed to contributing to the
development and promotion of this platform. The Board was forms into contractual consortium
with well–defined rules specifying the rights and obligations toward generated IPR. The Board
is open with members able to join and leave according to their needs.
When JADE was became public, it was used almost exclusively by the FIPA community but as
its feature set grew far beyond the FIPA specifications, so did its use by a globally distributed
developer community. It is important to note that this platform contributed to wide diffusion of
the FIPA specifications by providing a set of tools and software abstractions that hid the
specifications themselves; programmers could essentially implement according to the
specifications without the need to study them | en_US |