JADE

I. History

JADE was first released in September 1996. It was conceived by Sir Gilbert Simpson and is currently developed by the Jade Software Corporation.   JADE is used throughout the public hospitals in Australia’s Northern Territory and powers the scheduling software for Britain’s largest rail freight operator.  The latest version is JADE 7.

II. Features

JADE is a parallel programming language for exploiting coarse-grain concurrency processing in sequential, imperative programs. JADE allows programmers to implement a shared memory model by letting any process access shared objects transparently. Commonly, JADE programmers augment their sequential programs with special constructs that divides the whole computation into tasks and specify how each task would access shared objects. JADE interprets these instructions but still preserve sequential semantics. The JADE implementation analyzes divided modules and determines which tasks can be executed concurrently. JADE is object-oriented with syntax based on Modula-2 – derived from Pascal.

JADE offers developers the ease to store, retrieve and manipulate complex object models from different frameworks. Also, while providing portability, JADE lets designers to build distributed systems of complex logic with automatic object caching for better performance. It entirely eliminates the development effort required to move objects to and from a database. Another thing to consider is that JADE is distributed in Open Source. It is implemented with a GUI somehow making programming easy and a lot more organized.

Though implemented with Java and is considered to be a high-level object-oriented programming language, JADE developers chose to set aside common and at the same time somehow very significant features. JADE does not support method overloading and operators. Also it does not provide constructors with specific parameters; which can lead to problems regarding the proper initialization of a particular object. Though missing some important modern object-oriented features, it is built with an object manager.

Summing it all up JADE is a modern language with great features and compatibility advantages of other well-known programming languages packaged into one. In addition, it is developed to let programming be easier but at the same time efficient.

III. Applications

1. Databases – Jade is a very useful programming language in when talking about databases simply because object database is a native part of its language.

2. Web services - JADE supports deployment of applications to the web through its HTML documents feature. These work very similarly to ASP.NET, where developers create templates of HTML pages and leave parts in the template for the program to fill in.

3. GUI – As programming language based on java, Jade introduced a whole new kinds of libraries applicable in creating User Interfaces.

IV. "Hello World" in Jade

helloWorld();

begin

   write "Hello, World!";

end;

V. Insights

 "Our JADE system is critical to the operation of our organisation, particularly our communications with our supporters and management of child sponsorships. Since going live, it has met all performance demands, with absolutely no unscheduled outages. The reliability of the JADE platform and JADE Care24 managed service has been excellent." - Andrea Spurdle, Head of IT, World Vision UK

"JADE is great for small, agile, collaborative development teams like ourselves. Teams of customer-oriented, solution-focused developers who get a kick out of getting on and delivering stuff. JADE enables us to achieve a high degree of code reuse and with its seamless database integration we have less code to worry about reusing. Since 1996, JADE has given us a real solid platform that we can rely on. A single platform on which we can build large commercial systems that can scale from small, inexpensive hardware to high-end servers. It has never let us or our customers down." -Allan Baird, Abel Software Limited

 "We have used SQL Server and Microsoft's Business Intelligence tools for our data warehousing needs for more than four years. The ETL process is an important element of any data warehouse to ensure that data is loaded quickly and accurately. RPS in JADE delivers an automated and seamless mechanism to transfer data from our core online JADE systems to SQL Server. This provides us with a cost-effective approach to significantly improve the availability, performance, scalability and security of the first stage of our ETL process." -Debbie Richardson, IT Director, Homeloan Management Limited

"JADE enables the entire server-side of Greentree to be encapsulated in a single installation directory. This greatly simplifies system administration and makes Greentree reliable, robust, and extremely cost effective from an IT perspective. We can easily run multiple independent, isolated installations on the same machine without them affecting each other, which is great for development and testing." -Stephen Sims, Director R&D, Greentee International

"Okay, first of all, it's not cross-platform. There lies the first problem to scalable development. A first look at its features and you would see that the stack used for JADE can only be used to its full potential when running on a Windows environment. Tama ba ako? Of course, if there are other cross-platform stacks out there that are both open source and very reliable in terms of end-to-end deployment (regardless of application stacks) JADE doesn't look very promising." -Allister Alambra, Instructor 1 at ICS

"A very good language for web applications because it is almost like a combined java and php. Its built in libraries make OOP easier to implement in web." -Reecenil Valencia


"Easy to learn, somehow noob friendly" - Aldreege Beltran

"Sa syntax ng Jade, mas human-readable siya compared sa ibang programming languages kaya bilang isang typical user, mas preferred ko ang jade. " -Angelo dela Cruz

"Jade is like a combination of known programming languages. Also, its syntax is easy to learn and understand." - Marjerie Anne Roxas

"Easy to learn and implement that can support multilingual properties and most of all, portable." - Sheleen San Antonio

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JADE_(programming_language)

http://www.jade.co.nz

http://www.devtopics.com/jade-obscure-programming-language-of-the-month/

http://jade.tilab.com/application-app.htm

http://suif.stanford.edu/jade.html

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/thesis.pdf

CMSC 124 T-5L

Beltran, Aldreege             2010-26797

Dela Cruz, Jose Angelo    2010-13975 

Roxas, Marjerie Anne      2010-03959

San Antonio, Sheleen       2010-03283

Valencia, Reecenil           2010-04038