There is an emerging desire among agent researchers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favour of developing methodologies and tool-kits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This philosophy has led to the development of the ZEUS agent building tool-kit, which facilitates the engineering of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent-level components and an environment to support the agent building process. The ZEUS tool-kit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions that provide an integrated environment for rapid software engineering of collaborative agent applications.