Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm where the construction of the software is centered around the concept of software agents. In contrast to object-oriented programming which has objects (providing methods with variable parameters) at its core, AOP has externally-specified agents (with interfaces and messaging capabilities) at its core. They can be thought of as abstractions of objects. Exchanged messages are interpreted by receiving "agents", in a way specific to its class of agents.

History

Historically the concept of Agent-oriented programming and the idea of centering your software around the concept of agent was first used by Yoav Shoham within his Artificial Intelligence studies, in 1990.^[1][2] His agents are specific to his own paradigm as they have just one method, with a single parameter. To quote Yoav Shoham from his paper in 1990 for a basic difference between of AOP against OOP:

...agent-oriented programming (AOP), which can be viewed as a specialization of object-oriented programming. ...

JADE

There are multiple 'frameworks' that implement Shoham's programming paradigm, for the Java-platform one of the frameworks is JADE (http://jade.tilab.com/). Following a very basic example [1] of an Agent that runs code

package helloworld;
import jade.core.Agent;
 
public class Hello extends Agent {
 
        protected void setup() { 
                System.out.println("Hello World. ");
                System.out.println("My name is "+ getLocalName()); 
        }
 
        public Hello() {
                System.out.println("Constructor called");
        }
 
}

References

1. ^ Shoham, Y. (1990) (Technical Report STAN-CS-90-1335). Agent-Oriented Programming. Stanford University: Computer Science Department. 
2. ^ Shoham, Y. (1993). Agent-Oriented Programming. Artificial Intelligence. pp. 51–92. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.123.5119&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Retrieved 2010-08-12. 

See also

• Software agent