The Eclipse Foundation today introduced the Agent Definition Language (ADL), an open language and visual toolkit for defining agent behavior.
It was introduced as a part of the Eclipse Language Models Operating System (LMOS) project, an open source platform for building and running multi-agent systems.
“Agentic AI is redefining enterprise software, yet until now there has been no open source alternatives to proprietary offerings,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “With Eclipse LMOS and ADL, we’re delivering a powerful, open platform that any organisation can use to build scalable, intelligent, and transparent agentic systems.”
According to the Eclipse Foundation, ADL allows both business and engineering teams to collaborate on defining agent behavior in a maintainable and versionable way. It separates business logic from prompts, which makes it easier to build agents that can change.
It is designed so that engineers set it up initially and then business users can continually iterate on the agent rules without needing to write code.
“With ADL, we wanted to make defining agent behaviour as intuitive as describing a business process, while retaining the rigor engineers expect,” said Arun Joseph, Eclipse LMOS project lead. “It eliminates the fragility of prompt-based design and gives enterprises a practical path to scale agentic AI using their existing teams and resources.”
Anyone interested in trying it out can visit the Eclipse Foundation’s interactive Playground.
