Metaglue: A programming language for multi-agent systems

Metaglue is an extension to the Java programming language that provides very high-level support for writing groups of small software agents that interact with one another. Metaglue was developed as part of the Al Lab's Intelligent Room Project. The Intelligent Room has literally dozens of hardware and software components that run on a variety of networked workstations. We needed a system that could link all of these components and coordinate the flow of data among them. The computational needs of the Intelligent Room-- while not unique-- were not satisfied by any pre-existing software systems or programming environments. We wanted the Intelligent Room's software infrastructure to be persistent, robust, and dynamically reconfigurable. We needed the ability to modify (or even introduce) individual components without bringing the whole system down, and we wanted to have tools for understanding and debugging the behavior of large groups of interactin