Ping example using Jade

A key emphasis in designing and building Nuin has been to not duplicate work that is ongoing in other agent infrastructure projects. This includes, for example, FIPA compliant messaging and directory services. As one of the most commonly used agent platforms, Jade is a prima facie example of a tool that Nuin should interoperate with. To this end, Nuin includes service adapters specifically for working with Jade agents. These are still somewhat immature, and many of the more advanced capabilities of Jade are not directly accessible to Nuin agent behaviours. This will change in time. In the meantime, this example shows who to configure two Nuin/Jade agents so that they can ping each other.

Running Nuin agents from the Jade environment can be accomplished in various ways. See the Jade documentation for details. To make the process easier, Nuin includes a specialised agent whose job is to start from the Jade command line, and start other agents based on a configuration file in RDF. For example:

java jade.Boot -gui \\
   nuinconf:org.nuin.integration.jade.NuinConfigAgent( file:rdf/config.rdf )
      

The above method is recommended for starting the Jade ping example to demonstrate that it works. Note that the Jade integration code has only been tested with the most recent snapshot version of Jade.