Agent-oriented programming

Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm where the construction of the software is centered on 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.

Historically, the concept of agent-oriented programming and the idea of centering software around the concept of an Agent was introduced by Yoav Shoham within his Artificial Intelligence studies in 1990. 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:

There are multiple AOP 'frameworks', also called agent platforms, that implement Shoham's programming paradigm. The following examples illustrate how a basic agent is programmed as a hello-world program.

For the Java-platform one of the frameworks is JADE (http://jade.tilab.com/). Here is a very basic example [1] of an agent that runs code

At the core of JADE's AOP model is that its API supports the standard FIPA Agent Communication Language

For a literal translation of agent-oriented concepts into a scheme unobfuscated as is JADE, behind Java and Object Orientedness, Agent Speak (Jason) provides a "natural" language for agents.

GOAL is an agent programming language for programming cognitive agents. GOAL agents derive their choice of action from their beliefs and goals. The language provides the basic building blocks to design and implement cognitive agents by programming constructs that allow and facilitate the manipulation of an agent's beliefs and goals and to structure its decision-making. The language provides an intuitive programming framework based on common sense or practical reasoning.

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