Exploiting the Eclipse Ecosystem for Agent-Oriented Programming

In this paper we discuss first explorations about exploiting the Eclipse framework in the context of agent-oriented programming, using an agent-oriented programming platform called JaCa. At first, we discuss how the Eclipse framework can be naturally exploited for designing and developing a modular feature-rich agent-oriented IDE, to represent, manipulate, inspect JaCa programs directly in terms of such agent-oriented abstractions defined by the JaCa computation/programming model. Then, we extend the scope of the discussion by devising: (a) the opportunity of exploiting Eclipse for exploring a model-driven approach to agent-oriented programming and to the development of the agent-oriented programming languages and the platforms themselves; and (b) the opportunity of injecting agents into the Eclipse ecosystem, so as to enrich it with first-class human-inspired abstractions to deal with the flexible organization of concurrent and distributed tasks, and their coordination.