GOING BEYOND MOBILE AGENT PLATFORMS: COMPONENT-BASED DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE AGENT SYSTEMS

Although mobile agents are a promising programming paradigm, the actual deployment of this technology in real applications has been far away from what the researchers were expecting. One important reason for this is the fact that in the current mobile agent frameworks it is quite difficult to develop applications without having to center them on the mobile agents and on the agent platforms. In this paper, we present a component-based framework that enables ordinary applications to use mobile agents in an easy and flexible way. By using this approach, applications can be developed using current objectoriented approaches and become able of sending and receiving agents by the simple drag-and-drop of mobility components. The framework was implemented using the JavaBeans component model and provides integration with ActiveX, which allows applications to be written in a wide variety of programming languages. By using this framework, the development of applications that can make use of mobile agents is greatly simplified, which can contribute to a wider spreading of the mobile agent technology. Keyworks: Mobile Agents, Software Components, Reusability, Internet Computing, Distributed Systems