6.8 agents and oBjeCts 169
sage sending and receiving. The language is compiled into byte-code, which
is then interpreted by the APRIL runtime engine.
While the agent-oriented programming (AOP) paradigm was intro-
duced more than ten years ago by Yoav Shoam, there are still no AO lan-
guages used in practice for developing a multiagent system. Some tools have
been developed in recent years to support the implementation of agents and
multiagent systems, but none are based on a proper agent-oriented language.
An inspiring list of agent tools is available at the AgentLink website (http://
www.agentlink.org). Current agent development tools are mainly built on
top of Java and use the object-oriented paradigm for implementing software.