Omicini Paolo Petta Matjaž Gams

away from the underlying programming languagein favour of using graphical means of programming, suchas wizards and statecharts. Platforms. Closed frameworks such as DESIRE, strongly based on a platform, provide more complete solutions thanothers such as Jadex or TuCSoN. They usually offer anagent architecture and a system model, very useful fornovel developers, together with the communication infrasA SURVEY OF LANGUAGES AND PLATFORMS. . .Informatica 30 (2006) 33–44 41 tructure and a range of robust services, such as directoryfacilitators, agent management services, and monitoringfacilities. As a drawback, closed frameworks limit thedevelopment. For example, the design approach of theframework may not fit certain domain problems. Perhaps that is the reason why most researchers tend to use moreopen solutions. Currently, the most popular solution isto use JADE as underlying agent infrastructure combinedwith some other (higher-level) approach to program theagents’ behaviour. When dealing with more generalframeworks (rather than tied to a platform), their use (i.e.,defining the agents that will run within it, together withthe required services and resources) should be automatedas much as possible, in part to free the developer fromlow-level details (e.g. location of the configuration files,their concrete syntax, etc.). Despite this, few existingframeworks have IDE support. Concerning the paradigmof communication used, there are several on offer, oftenbeing an important issue when choosing which frameworkto adopt. TuCSoN is representative of tuple-centredcommunication, JADE of message passing, and DESIREof data flow among processes. The various approaches mentioned along this survey in-dicate that there is still much work to be done. Among themajor challenges faced by this research community are: – The conception and development of specialised de-bugging tools, in particular for cognitive agent lan-guages; – The integration of agent tools into existing IDEs,rather than starting from scratch; – The separation of MAS frameworks from agent plat-forms, so that each framework can be used for deploy-ing systems on a variety of platforms. – The dissemination of the MAS programmingparadigm, so that programmers have a better un-derstanding of its foundations as well as practical