Wolf – An Eclipse Plug-In for WADE

Abstract

This paper describes WOLF, a development environment for WADE-based applications. WADE is a software platform, based on JADE, a popular Open Source framework, for the development of distributed applications based on the agent oriented paradigm and exploiting the workflow metaphor to define system logics. The main advantage of the workflow metaphor is the expressiveness of the workflow itself, since it can be easily understood both by programmers and domain experts. The main feature of WOLF is the support for the graphical definition of workflows. Besides that, it also helps developers in setting up an Eclipse project for developing and managing WADE-based applications. WOLF is an Eclipse Plug-in and, as a consequence, allows WADE developers to exploit the full power of the Eclipse IDE.The paper focuses on the graphical definition of workflows and shows how WADE can take advantage of WOLF in defining the system logics by means of workflows.