Jude 0.5.0

Jude is a rapid application development tool that permits to formalize a problem and then obtain a full featured and easy to use data management, workgroup application that can be further adapted implementing specific agents.

Jude is based on a knowledge-base with an object-oriented structure on the server side and a compound-document, agent-based user interface on the client side.

Relational database, Object-Oriented database, document-management systems, XML documents, compound-documents, declarative programming, agent-based systems and Java are well understood technologies but when you use them alone in order to build data-management applications you encounter many problems.

For example relational databases management systems cannot support new data types and for some applications the allowed data are not sufficient. They lack support for long-transactions.

The development of an application using object-oriented database management systems encourages procedural coding over declarative coding and this tends to produce code hard to maintain because there are many relationships between different parts of the program. Jude tries to join all benefits of these technologies in a coherent application framework.

Jude permits developers to specify an abstract, simplified view of the world we wish to represent using an high-level, declarative, object-oriented language and then to obtain a full functional work-group application. Jude try to join in a simple but powerful way many powerful programming paradigms: object-oriented, declarative, agent-based and compound-document.

Developers can extend application functionalities adding new agents to the system. Developers can reuse already specified knowledge-base clusters (there are already clusters related to physics, organization relationships, chemical). Developers can reuse already specified agents, in particular agents related to user interface.

Jude permits users to manage (view, edit, retrieve) documents and structured informations using a coherent and simple to grasp environment based on Java and Swing library.