Obtaining Jade

    Introduction
  1. --> Installing the software
  2. Your first programs
  3. Parallelism and Behaviours
  4. Agent communication
  5. Using the Directory Facilities (DF)
  6. Using Jade Behaviours
  7. Using ontologies
  8. Graphical Interfaces
  9. Mobility
updated july, 2004

The official web site for JADE is: http://jade.cselt.it.

The latest release is 3.2 (July 2004). The first time you access the download area, you will have to register by providing your EMail address. You will be sent a password and thereafter you can complete the login. You will be asked to agree to the licensing terms. Then you can download JADE either as four zipped files or in one large file ( ~8Mb ). The largest file contains the documentation and accounts for over half the size of the distribution with over 700 files.

The packaging IS a bit sloppy: the large ZIP file just contains the four smaller (also) zipped files and doesn't really simplify the installation. When you unzip those, you get seperate folders, each with its own "jade" folder containing the really useful folders (lib, bin, etc...) along with duplicates of identical files (like README). You should consolidate all "jade" folders into a single directory containing the following files:

   ChangeLog  License  README  build.xml  
   classes/   demo/    doc/    lib/     src/
The important directories are:

Setting up the environment

The first thing to do after JADE has been downloaded and installed is to set up the Java CLASSPATH so that whenever Jade programs are compiled or executed, the correct libraries are used.

In the README file (sect. 5.3.3), Fabio suggests the following:

First of all set the CLASSPATH to include the JAR files in the lib 
subdirectory and the current directory. For instance, for Windows 9x/NT use 
the following command:

set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;.;c:\jade\lib\jade.jar;
        c:\jade\lib\jadeTools.jar; c:\jade\lib\Base64.jar;
		  c:\jade\lib\http.jar;c:\jade\lib\iiop.jar

NOTE: when updating to version 3.2, you MUST modify your old CLASSPATH
      and add http.jar which wasn't in Jade 3.1 .

With UNIX, with the Cshell, this is done through setenv commands in the ".cshrc" file which is executed whenever a new window is created. These are the commands I use ( I assume that "jade" is a folder in my home directory):

   setenv JADE_LIB  "${HOME}/jade/lib"
   setenv CLASSPATH ".:${JADE_LIB}/jade.jar:${JADE_LIB}/iiop.jar:${JADE_LIB}/http.jar\
        :${JADE_LIB}/Base64.jar:${JADE_LIB}/jadeTools.jar"

In a Windows XP environment, you initialize the environment variables by using the "Control Panel" -> System -> "Environment variables" and creating the CLASSPATH User variable and giving it the list of jar files. The syntax is different than for UNIX but the form is very similar . You should then create a new "com" window and check your work:

   echo %CLASSPATH%

should print:

      c:\jade\lib\jade.jar;c:\jade\lib\iiop.jar;c:\jade\lib\http.jar;
         c:\jade\lib\jadeTools.jar;c:\jade\lib\Base64.jar;

In his tutorial, D. Grimshaw suggests creating two batch files one for jade compilation and the other for execution which include the classpath information, but I think that it is simpler to set the CLASSPATH in the environment as shown above.

JBuilder

JBuilder is a popular environment for Java development and there exist several tutorials on installing both Jade and JBuilder. updated feb. 25, 2004
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