This document has been written to provide information on the Agent Runtime Environment (ARE), including in-depth technical documentation for users of the ARE. It is not intended to be a replacement for the JavaDoc but should be considered as a precursor or a complement to it.

This document does not provide guidelines on working with the ARE, for instance for toolkit developers, but explicitly clarifies the design decisions made during development of the ARE, including the impact of those decisions. This document also contains an exhaustive set of promises where we tell you what the ARE can do and warn you about what it cannot do.

This book uses the RFC keywords must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, may and optional as specified in [RFC2119]. In order to prevent confusion with similar words like “must”, the keywords are formatted in a different style.

Occasionally, this specification might describe features that are not (fully) implemented in the release. This document is a work-in-progress, and does not completely describe the design and specification of the ARE.