Aglets 2.5

It took very much time to get to the new  alpha release of the Aglets Mobile Agent Platform. The version is the 2.5, that creates an hole between the previous one, 2.0.2, but since there are so many improvements the I decided to make it clear that this is a version that has touched almost every part of the platform.

There are important changes, the much visible of which is the new GUI that is based on Swing and no more on AWT. The GUI has not been simply converted from AWT to Swing, but it has also been restructured in order to be simpler and more friendly to use, as well as of course include the new features.

Behind the hood, the platform now supports the sleeping of an agent in a manner similar to Thread.currentThread().sleep(), and a lot of classes have been adjusted to be type safe and better organized. This means that Aglets now requires a newer version of Java, in particular at least J2SE 6. The reason for that is the adoption of a fully integrated localization system that is based on J2SE 6 Resource Bundle, wrapped in an AgletTranslator object that allows the user, as well as agents, to get localized texts and icons.

Other improvements are related to the general management of the internal data structures, that has changed from slightly to deeply depending on the case.

You can download a zip archive containing the alpha release from here.

I will thank everyone that assisted me in this long process, and I will apologize for this late releasing. 

This release makes also the old web site to become unavailable, relying instead on the default Sourceforge web content (as shown below). The reason for this is that the old site was still linking the AgentGroup @ Unimore, that didn't help me within Aglets and, in fact, copied and paster part of my work within this project releasing it as their own! It is evident if you see the papers related to Aglets: the first in the list ((Leveraging strong agent mobility for Aglets with the Mobile JikesRVM framework. Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience) contains parts of the second article (Strong Agent Mobility for Aglets based on the IBM JikesRVM) that was written before with my contribution. So to get it short, I removed the web site with all references to Unimore. The following is how the site was appearing and how it appears now.

Here I post some screenshots from the new alpha release.