Imperative and Event-Driven Programming of Interoperable Software Agents

Jadescript is a recent agent-oriented programming language conceived to support the effective development of agents and multi-agent systems based on JADE. Jadescript is designed to ease the development of agents by means of a tailored syntax matched with a programmer-friendly development environment. This paper presents a brief overview of Jadescript by describing its main features and abstractions and by comparing them with the corresponding features and abstractions advocated by other agent-oriented programming languages. Moreover, to show the applicability of Jadescript to the construction of interesting multi-agent systems, this paper concisely summarizes a case study in which Jadescript is used to implement agents that participate in English auctions. Finally, this paper is concluded with a brief overview of planned future developments of the language.