[an error occurred while processing this directive] Mobile Agents [an error occurred while processing this directive]

JavaWorld had a two part article on mobile agents and aglets in their April and May issues:
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:
- David Halls, John Bates and Jean Bacon, Flexible Distributed Programming using Mobile Code , ACM SIGOPS '96 European Workshop.
- David Halls, Jean Bacon, and John Bates A Framework to Support Mobile Users of Multimedia Applications, in ACM Mobile Networks and Nomadic Applications.
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

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Modified on Thursday, 17-Dec-1998 21:50:39 EST --