Bee-gent: bonding and encapsulation enhancement agent framework for development of distributed systems

Interoperability between different systems is becoming a more important issue as computer networks expand. In this paper, we propose Bee-gent (Bonding and Encapsulation Enhancement Agent), a distributed system development-framework that aims to provide coordination between RDBMSs, legacy systems, software packages, and so forth. The Bee-gent coordination mechanism is an integration of interaction protocols that explicitly describe the relationship of the elements of a distributed system. Our approach is to split interaction protocols into the flow for the overall problem solving sequence and the location dependent local flow. Further mobile mediation agents coordinate the behavior of each element according to the flow of the problem solving sequence. We present an example of system development using Bee-gent that demonstrates how maintenance becomes simpler in the face of modifying the distributed system components.