|
UMBC AgentWeb
|
|
-
JavaWorld had a two
part article on mobile agents and aglets in their April and May
issues:
-
Under the Hood: The architecture of aglets. "Find out about the
inner workings of aglets, IBM Japan's Java-based autonomous software
agent technology. Mobile agents have been around for many years, but
they haven't yet entered the mainstream. This article takes a look at
aglets, a mobile-agent technology built on top of Java. (3,400 words)
-
Solve real problems with aglets, a type of mobile agent. Part two
of this series explains the significance of mobile agents, such as
aglets -- IBM Japan's Java-based, autonomous software agent
technology. Mobile agents have been around for many years, but they
haven't yet entered the mainstream. Last month's "Under The Hood"
described the inner workings of aglets, a mobile-agent technology
built on top of Java. This article answers the question: Why would
developers choose mobile agents over other software technologies, such
as client/server, applets, and servlets, for solving real-world
problems? (2,900 words)
- Ara ("Agents
for Remote Action") is a platform for the portable and secure
execution of mobile agents currently under development at the
University of Kaiserslautern. Mobile agents in this sense are programs
with the ability to change their host machine during execution while
preserving their internal state. This enables them to handle
interactions locally which otherwise had to be performed
remotely. Ara's specific aim in comparison to similar platforms is to
provide full mobile agent functionality while retaining as much as
possible of established programming models and languages. Various
interpreted programming languages can be adapted to Ara (so far, Tcl
and C/C++ have been adapted; Java will come soon), making them usable
for mobile agent programming. Ara is intended as a general system
platform on top of which specific applications such as information
mining, mobile device support, active documents, DAI etc. can be
built. Version 1.0 alpha of the Ara platform (for Solaris, Linux and
SunOS) has been released free for non-commercial purposes, including
the complete source code, extensive documentation, and a number of
example agents.
4/2/97
- MOBILE OBJECT SYSTEMS,
Towards the Programmable Internet, Jan Vitek and Christian
Tschudin (Eds.), Second International Workshop, MOS'96, Linz, Austria,
July 1996, Springer-Verlag Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 1222, Selected Presentations and Invited
Papers, ISBN 3-540-62852-5, April, 1997.
"This book presents a collection of papers dealing with different
aspects of mobile computations. Mobile computations are computations
that are not bound to single locations, but may move at will to best
use the computer network's resources. In this view, the network
becomes a single, vast, programmable environment. Among computer
scientists, many feel that this approach will have a profound effect
on the way we design and implement distributed applications, and they
agree that we are witnessing a paradigm change. However, this new and
exciting paradigm requires advances, both theoretical and applied, in
fields such as programming languages (where we need a sound semantic
foundation and efficient implementations), operating systems and
software safety and security. Some of the first steps towards a
programmable Internet are documented here."
3/20/97
-
Jeremy Hylton (jeremy@cnri.reston.va.us)
has developed a
mobile code bibliography which currently includes 78 entries
mobile code, mobile agents, and related systems. It is available in
three forms: with abstracts, without abstracts and as BibTeX source.
The citations focus on system support for mobile agents, code mobility
(i.e., code is shipped between nodes), safety and security for mobile
code, and and active networks (i.e., packets contain code executed at
routers.) Jeremy would like to receive corrections and appropriate
contributions (in Bibtex) by email using "mobile code bibliography" as
the subject. 3/7/97
-
Danny Lange and Mitsuru Oshima of IBM Research are working on a book
"Mobile Agents
in Java - With the Java Aglet API". An outline and draft of the
initial chapters are available on the wev. Planned chapters include:
1. Preface; 2. Elements of the Java Aglet API; 3. Anatomy of an Aglet;
4 .Aglet Context; 5. Working With the Proxy; 6. Aglet Messaging;
7. Trip Planning with the Itinerary; 8. Aglet Usage Patterns; and
9. Aglet Security as well as appendices 1. Examples and 2. The Java
Aglet API. 3/3/97
-
Kali Scheme
is a distributed implementation of Scheme developed at the NEC
Research Institute that permits efficient transmission of higher-order
objects such as closures and continuations. The integration of
distributed communication facilities within a higher-order programming
language engenders a number of new abstractions and paradigms for
distributed computing, including user-specified load-balancing and
migration policies for threads, incrementally-linked distributed
computations, and parameterized client-server applications. See
Software can be downloaded .
-
The Tube is a
mobile code system developed by David Halls (dah28@cl.cam.ac.uk). It is a
portable platform for the remote execution of Scheme
programs. Programs (or REPs for Remotely Executable Programs) can be
written which will run on any machine in a heterogenous network of
computers. Further details are available in:
There is a Netscape plug-in that allows "Tubelets" to be referred to
from inside WWW pages. The plugin forwards Tubelets onto a REP-site
for execution. 2/24/97
- The alpha 3 release of IBM's Aglets Workbench has been
released. An aglet is a Java object that can move from one host on
the Internet to another. That is, an aglet can suddenly stop executing
on its current host, move to a remote host, and resume execution
there. When the aglet moves, it takes along its program code as well
as its state (data). The Java Aglet API (J-AAPI) is a proposed
standard for interfacing aglets and their environment which is simple,
flexible, and stable. It contains methods for initializing an aglet,
handling messages, and dispatching, retracting,
deactivating/activating, cloning, and disposing of the aglet.
11/16/96
-
The Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents was held in September, 1996 at
Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire). An
on-line proceedings provides copies of the the speaker's slides as
well as summaries of the talks and the dicussion periods that
followed. 11/11/96
- At ICMAS96
(The Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems, December
10th to 13th, Kyoto, Japan), NTT, Kyoto University, Nara Institute of
Science and Technology, and Kobe University will jointly exhibit a
mobile computing system that provides (1) E-mail, E-forum and Internet
access services, (2) conference and tourist information for local
sites, and (3) social match making based on participants' profiles and
schedules to arrange meetings, teas, dinners and so on. About 100
Sony MagicLink's with handy phones will be loaned to conference
participants (free!) to try out the system. The participants can use
the PDAs at the conference site, hotels, parks, and so on. Magic Cap
is being used on the PDAs and Telescript on servers. For more
information enquire at
icmas96mobile@lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp or see http://www.lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/icmas96mobile/
11/4/96
- Agent
Transfer Protocol (ATP) is an application-level standard protocol
for distributed agent-based information systems. Aimed at the Internet
and using Universal Resource Locators (URL) for agent resource
location, ATP offers a uniform and platform-independent protocol for
transferring agents between networked computers. While mobile agents
may be written in many different languages and for a variety of
vendor-specific agent systems, ATP offers the opportunity to handle
agent mobility in a general and uniform way. For example, any agent
host machine will have a single and unique name independent of the set
of vendor-specific agent systems it supports. ATP also provides a
uniform agent transport mechanism and allows a standard agent query
facility to be used throughout the network. A draft
specification document is available. 10/1/96
- Phantom is an interpreted language designed for
large-scale, interactive, distributed applications such as distributed
conferencing systems, multi-player games, and collaborative work
tools. Phantom combines the distributed lexical scoping semantics of
Obliq with a substantial language core. The language core is based on
a safe, extended subset of Modula-3, and supports a number of modern
programming features, including static typing with implicit
declarations, objects, lightweight threads, and higher-order functions
and lambda expressions. 7/27/96
- Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents, September 27-28, 1996. Dartmouth
College, Hanover NH. PArticipation will be limited and people wishing
to attend should submit abstract and bios by August 15, 1996.7/23/96
- Technology: Sun has released Tcl Plug-ins
for Netscape Navigator, making it possible to create Web pages that
include Tcl/Tk scripts. This provides an interesting alternative to
the use of Java applets for Web-based agent programs. Sun's current
version of the Tcl plug-in runs only with Netscape Navigator under
Solaris, Macintosh, and Windows with support for other browsers and
operating systems planned. 9/11/96
- Technology: IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory is making available
an early release of their Aglets Library for programming mobile agents
in Java(tm). The package is based on JDK 1.0.2 and Object
Serialization in the RMI package from JavaSoft. The first beta release
includes Java packages, documentation, and a demo applications.
7/9/96
- Penguin
is a Perl 5 module that provides a set of functions to (1) send
encrypted, digitally signed perl code to a remote machine to be
executed; and (2) receive code and, depending on who signed it,
execute it in an arbitrarily secure, limited compartment. The
combination of these functions enable direct perl coding of algorithms
to handle safe internet commerce, mobile information-gathering agents,
"live content" web browser helper apps, distributed load-balanced
computation, remote software update, distance machine administration,
content-based information propagation, Internet-wide shared-data
applications, network application builders, and so on. 6/16/96
- Aglets is the
name of a Java class library for mobile Internet agents developed at
the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory. An aglet is a persistent and
transportable Java(tm) object that executes asynchronously on the host
computer in an execution context. The execution context provides a
secure environment, protecting both the host computer system and the
aglet from malicious aglets. 5/14/96
- Technology: Java-To-Go
- Itinerative Computing Using Java. Java-To-Go is an experimental
infrastructure developed by William Li (wli@eecs.berkeley.edu) that
assists in the development and experimentation of mobile agents and
agent-based applications for itinerative computing (itinerative
computing: the set of applications that requires site-to-site
computations. Sites are usually traversed in sequence by a single
mobile agent or in parallel by a group of agents). Agents are given
the freedom to perform active computations (that is, computations are
initiated by the agents at its volition) at one or more remote agent
servers. In contrast, standard Java applets can only be invoked
passively. 5/11/96
- Technology: Ftp Software has released the CyberAgent Software Development
Kit which provides numerous agent classes designed to expedite the
development of Java-based mobile agents. The CyberAgent classes
include templates to create an intelligent agent, start an agent, stop
an agent, define a travel plan, allow access to OLE-enabled
applications, and support secure agent communications. You can also
use the agent classes with various third-party Java integrated
development environments (IDEs). 5/11/96
-
Language Support for Mobile Agents, Fritz Knabe,
Ph.D. Dissertation, CMU. 1/19/95
- Agent
Tcl is a transportable agent system in which the agents are
written in Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0. Agent Tcl is under continuous use at
Dartmouth in a range of information-retrieval and
information-management applications. It is roughly analagous to
Telescript except that it uses Tcl, is lightweight, and *currently*
provides limited security. An alpha release is now available which
runs on standard Unix platforms. 12/11/95
-
Mobile Code -- a comparison of a number of languages for mobile
code, including Java, safe-Tcl, Python, Scheme48, Obliq, LogicWare,
and others. 10/21/95
-
General Magic's Telescript and Magic Cap. 7/21/95 (GM is
holding a developers conference on October 29-31, 1995 in San Jose.
There is a press
release and a detailed description of the conference schedule
10/4/95
|
shows inverse links. Built by
bk2site.