The first agent framework we explored was [http://www.emorphia.com/research/about.htm FIPAOS].
It is somewhat heavy-weight, relying on speech-act communication protocols and communication languages (acl),
including a family of Semantic Languages (sl0, sl1,...).  To become proficient in these would have required
significant effort.  No on saw enough payoff to proceed with this package or any other FIPA based package
(e.g. [http://jade.cselt.it/ Jade]).

So we began to explore other agent packages.

The [http://cougaar.org/ Cougaar] package did not seem to require investment in speech-acts and semantic languages.
However, Cougaar does require MySQL dayabase support.  That is another learning experience for most of the people
involved.

The [http://diet-agents.sourceforge.net/Index.html DIET] package claims to be lightweight
It does not require speach-acts or any semantic language.  No database either!