The Webbridge Framework for Building Web-Based Agent Applications

Web applications represent an important category of applications that owe much of their popularity to the ubiquitous accessibility using standard web browsers. The complexity of web applications is steadily increasing since the inception of the Internet and the way it is perceived changes from a pure information source to a platform for applications. In order to make the task of building web applications easier many different web frameworks exist that aim at providing support for recurring and tedious development tasks. Most of the currently available web frameworks adhere to the widely accepted Model 2 design pattern that targets a clean separation of model, view and controller parts of an application in the sense of MVC. Nevertheless, existing frameworks are conceived to work with standard object-oriented business applications only and do not respect the particularities and possibilities of agent applications. Hence, in this paper a new architecture, in accordance with the Model 2 design pattern, is proposed that is able to combine the strengths of agent-based computing with web interactions. This architecture is the basis for the Jadex Webbridge framework, which enables a seamless integration of the Jadex BDI framework with state-of-the art JSP technology. The usage of web technology in combination with agents is further exemplified by an electronic bookstore case study.