Comparison and evaluation of performance of mobile agent toolkits JADE and Aglet

Abstract

Mobile agent applications becomes very spread in the recent years thus for its importance. This importance allows many of the toolkits to use in the development mobile agent applications; each toolkit has its own advantages and disadvantage. Therefore, we find that the software developers may hesitate of choosing the appropriate toolkit. Although many of comparison studies in this area have been submitted, but the continuous update make the developers need to an up-to-date evaluation on the existing toolkits. In this research, we compare between JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment framework) and Aglet based on three phases of evaluation. Phase one is frame based evaluation (we apply the framework of evaluate the agent toolkits proposed by Elhadi Shakshuki), phase two of evaluation based on running some scenarios and settings on each toolkit, while the third phase is the evaluation based on the features included in each toolkit which facilitate of using the toolkit and managing of mobile agent. The results obtained based on these phases showed the preference of JADE versus Aglet. This preference is due to the continuous update on JADE (The last version of JADE - JADE 4.3.3 - released on 11/12.2014 and previous version - JADE 4.3.1- released on 06/12/2013) while the last version of Aglet - Aglet 2.0.2 - released before 2010.