With the significant advances in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems in the last decade, promising technologies for the development and engineering of multi-agent systems have emerged. The result is a variety of agent-oriented programming languages, development frameworks, execution platforms, and tools that facilitate building and engineering of multi-agent systems. This paper provides an overview of the multi-agent programming research field and explains the aim and characteristics of various multi-agent programming languages and development frameworks. This overview is complemented with a discussion on the current trends and challenges in this research community.