Before the powerful agent programming paradigm can be adopted in commercial or industrial settings, a complete environment, similar to that for other programming languages, must be developed. This includes editors, libraries, and an environment for the completion of agent tasks. The DECAF[8] Agent architecture is a general purpose agent development platform that was designed specifically to support concurrency, distributed operations, support for high level programming paradigms, and high throughput. The architecture has been designed with built-in scalability which adapts itself to multiple processor architecture and highly distributed multi-agent systems. DECAF supports research efforts in planning and scheduling with modular design. The architecture also supports application development and has current developments in social modeling, middle agents, information extraction, and proxy operations. DECAF also supports the next step in the progression of the programming paradigm by allowing “flexible” and “structured persistent” actions [7]. This paper is a case study of the development of the DECAF architecture, tools that have been developed concurrently to support programming and testing, and some of the more significant applications designed using DECAF.