Exploiting Agent-Oriented Programming for Developing Future Internet Applications Based on the Web: The JaCa-Web Framework

Besides being suitable for tackling Distributed Artificial Intelligence problems, we argue that agent-oriented programming languages and multi-agent programming technologies provide an effective level of abstraction for tackling the design and programming of complex software systems in general. Internet applications based on the Web are an important example of such systems. Following the cloud computing perspective, these kinds of applications will more and more replace desktop applications, exploiting the Web infrastructure as a common distributed operating system. We argue that the development of these applications raises challenges that cannot be effectively tackled by mainstream programming paradigms, such as the object-oriented one, and could be effectively faced – instead – by an agent-oriented approach. Accordingly, in this paper we describe JaCa-Web, a framework that allows for applying agent-oriented programming technologies – in particular JaCa, which integrates Jason agent programming language and CArtAgO environment technology – to the development of advanced Web client applications.