ABLE lacks of vigor!!!   

Although ABLE is well designed by a group of experts in IBM, almost no one outside IBM is willing to utilize this tool. Why? the important reason is that ABLE's user guidance, especially programming guidance is sparse, even if it also has reference for its API. Compared with JADE, ABLE lacks of enough documents to help developers for their own purpose. For example, some one want to build their own Multi-agent System,the first important thing for him is the Message Transportation mechanism and how to let agents send and receive messages. Though the principle has been detailed clearly, no guidance to help developer to knowl how to program to realize this simple sending and receiving messages between two agents. Only API is not enough. We need detailed programming documents and examples to show us how it works. In addition to this, ABLE lacks of spirit of open source even if IBM say ABLE is an open source project. Another reason is ABLE's bad response to outside request, such as in Forums. One question has to wait a long time to receive the answer, which impairs the fervor of outside developer. Although JADE's design is worse than ABLE, we can imagine that a project attracting a large quantities of attention from international is to win over a well designed but few developing, few outside support ABLE. ABLE will dead, attributes to its low degree of openness to the outside world. Even if ABLE is powerfull, ABLE is well designed, it is nothing but an artwork buried deeply in the earth, and rotting gradually with time passing on.