The first twenty years of agent-based software development with JADE

A recent survey provides convincing evidence that JADE is among the most widely used tools to develop agent-based software systems. It finds application in industrial settings and to support research, and it has been used to introduce students to software agents in various universities. This paper offers a perspective on the current state of JADE by first presenting a chronicle of the relevant events that contributed to make JADE what it is today. Then, this paper enumerates some of the abstractions that JADE helped to identify and that are now commonly adopted in the community of researchers and practitioners interested in software agents and agent-based software development. Such abstractions have been successfully applied to construct relevant software systems, and among them, this paper reports on a mission-critical system that uses the abstractions that JADE contributed to identify to serve millions of users every day. Finally, this paper discusses an outlook on the near future of JADE by sketching a recent project that could contribute to provide a new perspective on the use of JADE.