Java Agent DEvelopment Framework, or JADE, is a software framework for multi-agent systems, in Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 that has been in development since at least 2001. The JADE platform allows the coordination of multiple FIPA

FIPA

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems....

-compliant agents and the use of the standard FIPA-ACL communication language in both SL and XML.
Jade creates multiple containers for agents, each of which can be on the same computing system or different systems. Together, a set of containers forms a platform.

Each platform must have a Main Container which holds two specialized agents called the AMS agent and the DF agent.

• The AMS (Agent Management System) agent is the authority in the platform.