Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(3) Continuous run Mobile agents must keep the ability to run consecutively at
different addresses. Specifically, mobile agents can hang the state when they
begin to move another node and run again at the hang state when they reach
the destination.
Currently, mobile agents have already come into practical applications from
the theory research. Researchers have built a series of mature development
platforms and run environments. Theoretically speaking, mobile agents can be
coded by any languages (such as C/ C++, Java, Perl, Tcl and Python etc.) and can
run on any machines. However, since mobile agents need to support different
software and hardware environment, it is better to choose an expositive,
platform-independent language to develop mobile agents. Java is an ideal
development language for mobile agent currently, since Java binary code after
compiling can run on any system that has the Java Virtual Machine (JVM),
having good cross-platform characteristic.
Although mobile agent has been a hot topic in academic research for many
years, the first really applicable mobile agent system was created until 1996.
Currently, the mobile system can be divided into three types: traditional
expositive language based, Java language based and CORBA platform based. We
introduce several typical mobile agent systems which represent the direction and
trend of mobile agents.
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General Magic's Odysses
As the early exploration, the Telescript developed by General Magic Company
has been widely adopted in last years. Telescript is a kind of object-oriented
expositive language. The mobile agents coded by Telescript have two formats in
communications. Firstly, one agent can call other agents' methods if they are in
the same place. Secondly, mobile agents can build the connection to transfer the
computable mobile objects if they are in different places. Telescript is a relative
successful mobile agent system since its emergence. It was secure and robust.
The performance is also excellent. Telescript's three basic concepts (agent, place
and go) gave a clear description for mobile agents: agent go place.
As the development of Java language and cross-platform technology,
Telescript lost its superiority and attraction. Under this condition, General Magic
began to change its policy. They developed a Java-based system called Odyssey
which can support Java RMI, Microsoft DCOM and CORBA IIOP. Odyssey
inherited many characteristics of Telescript and become a widely used mobile
agent development platform.
