Mozart - Mobile Agents"CREATE ONCE, GO ANYWHERE" |
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Welcome to the Mozart home page for DS420. What is an agent? No this is not the Bond, James Bond type agent that you may be thinking about. Agents are actually like a representative that assists us by doing something in our behalf. Agents allow people to delegate some unit of work or a process out from their busy schedule and concentrate on more important matters. An agent can do a variety of different things such as find the cheapest price on a product, get quotes or invest in the stock market for individuals.What is a mobile agent? A mobile agent is an agent, yes you guessed it, that is mobile. Formally, a mobile agent is an object that has behaviour, identity, state and location. In other words a mobile agent is able to traverse a network of hosts and execute a program(s) or retrieve information on behalf of the initiating user. These agents are usually autonomous, which allows them to transport themselves through the network from one host to another. Want more on mobility, check out the Agent Mobility section of our site. How do you develop mobile agents? We used a free SDK available from IBM called the Aglet Software Development Kit (ASDK v 1.0.3). They refer to a mobile agent as an "Aglet", the word coming from joining "Agent" and "Applet". Look up aglet at www.m-w.com and you will get the following
Although it means an end of your shoelace in the dictionary, to the mobile agent realm Aglets mean a "lightweight agent". Since the code is written in Java you will need Sun's JDK 1.1.7b or later. Do not use JDK 1.2, it will not work, unless you are attempting to use the ASDK 1.1 beta. There is other software out there but some cost $$ and others looked less up to date. Why use Aglets? The main reason we chose to use the ASDK is because it uses Java. Since Java is platform independent writing an Aglet only needs to be done once. After creating an Aglet it can be run on just about any platform. This is where the "Create Once, Go Anywhere" moto comes from. Also it was pretty cheap, how does "FREE" sound. The JDK we needed to program the Aglet was also "FREE". We ran these programs on our PC's, which consisted of a win 95 and win 98 machines. The only other resource used was our time, of which we have excess amounts, yeah right. Back to Top |
For problems or questions regarding this web contact [jalwan@shrike.depaul.edu].
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