Aria Language - Towards Agent Orientation Paradigm

As building large-scale software systems is complex, several software engineering paradigms have been devised. Agent oriented paradigm is one of the most predominant contributions to the field of software engineering and has the potential to significantly improve current practice of the field. The paradigm should be elaborated both practically and conceptually. Most existing agent oriented frameworks do not offer agent definition languages but propose to define agents with the help of agent libraries in existing object oriented languages. Few frameworks that propose languages lack conceptual principles for agent orientation. The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, an agent oriented language called Aria and its compiler are proposed. Aria language is a superset of Java language and the compiler compiles a program in Aria to an equivalent program in Java. These enable Aria to fully integrate with and preserve all the existing knowledge and code in Java. Secondly, the three well-known object oriented principles of abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism are redefined for agent orientation. As chat room is a distributed application, it is selected as a sample case, designed and developed successfully in Aria. In addition, agent MVC architecture is offered as the second case.