Foreword

Gustavo Aranda

Valencia, October 31, 2007

The idea of a Jabber-based agent platform appeared one night at 4 A.M. when, studying the features of the Jabber architecture, we found out great similarities with the ones of a FIPA-compliant agent platform. The Jabber protocol offered a great architecture for agents to communicate in a structured way and solved many issues present when designing a platform, such as authenticating the users (the agents), provide a directory or create communication channels.

We started to work on our first prototype of this Jabber-powered platform and within a week we had a small working proof of concept by the name of Fipper which eventually allowed for dumb agents to connect and communicate through a common jabber server.

Since that day, things have changed a bit. The small proof of concept evolved into a full-featured FIPA platform, and the new SPADE name was coined. As usual, we later had to find the meaning of the beautiful acronym. We came up with Smart Python multi-Agent Development Environment, which sounded both good and geek enough.

We hope you like this book and have as much fun using it as we had writing it. Of course we also hope that it may become useful, but that is a secondary matter.