E2 agent plugin architecture

E2 is a plugin-based, service-oriented middleware architecture. E2 extends the popular Eclipse platform's idea of building a software system entirely and dynamically from XML-interfaced plugins, adds the feature to remove and replace plugins on the fly, administers the plugin connection process, and provides a message transport plugin for distributed inter-E2 system communication. E2 introduces a generic user interface plugin that separates user interfaces and application functionality. With these extensions, E2 extends the plugin concept, with its success on the desktop, to the broader areas of distributed middleware and multi-agent systems. E2 retains compatibility with Eclipse so that it can reuse Eclipse plugins but also, via an extensible interpreter capability, adds compatibility with Web services and WSDL. This paper describes the E2 platform, implemented in Java, being used to develop the Everything is Alive agent system.