Mobile Agents for World Wide Web Distributed Database Access

The popularity of the Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing Web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based approaches for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability, and robustness. We propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports lightweight, portable, and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow or expensive networks. The implementation of the framework using the aglet workbench shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. We expect our framework to perform even better when deployed using different implementation platforms as indicated by our preliminary results from an implementation based on Voyager.

[1]  Gerti Kappel,et al.  Connecting Databases to the Web: A Taxonomy of Gateways , 1997, DEXA.

[2]  Peter Holfelder,et al.  Web database connectivity with scripting languages , 1997, World Wide Web J..

[3]  Marios D. Dikaiakos,et al.  A Performance Analysis Framework for Mobile-Agent Systems , 2000, Agents Workshop on Infrastructure for Multi-Agent Systems.

[4]  Thomas Magedanz,et al.  A mobile agent platform for IN based service environments , 1998, IN'98. 7th IEEE Intelligent Network Workshop Proceedings (Cat. No.98TH8364).

[5]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.0 , 1996, RFC.

[6]  Aaron Kershenbaum,et al.  Mobile Agents: Are They a Good Idea? , 1996, Mobile Object Systems.

[7]  W. W. Daniel,et al.  Business Statistics for Management and Economics , 1989 .

[8]  Aaas News,et al.  Book Reviews , 1893, Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal.

[9]  Tim Berners-Lee,et al.  The World-Wide Web , 1994, CACM.

[10]  Evaggelia Pitoura,et al.  Mobile agents for WWW distributed database access , 1999, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Data Engineering (Cat. No.99CB36337).

[11]  Danny B. Lange,et al.  Programming and Deploying Java¿ Mobile Agents with Aglets¿ , 1998 .

[12]  Evaggelia Pitoura,et al.  An Evaluation of the Java-Based Approaches to Web Database Access , 2000, CoopIS.

[13]  Gene Tsudik,et al.  Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing , 1995, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[14]  David Wong,et al.  Concordia: An Infrastructure for Collaborating Mobile Agents , 1997, Mobile Agents.

[15]  Stathes Hadjiefthymiades,et al.  A Generic Framework for the Deployment of Structured Databases on the World Wide Web , 1996, Comput. Networks.

[16]  Gene Tsudik,et al.  Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing , 1995, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[17]  Evaggelia Pitoura,et al.  Data Management for Mobile Computing , 1997, The Kluwer International Series on Advances in Database Systems.

[18]  Marios D. Dikaiakos,et al.  Mobile agent platforms for Web databases: a qualitative and quantitative assessment , 1999, Proceedings. First and Third International Symposium on Agent Systems Applications, and Mobile Agents.

[19]  Ed Anuff The Java Sourcebook , 1996 .

[20]  John Edwards,et al.  Mobile agent technology in support of sales order processing in the virtual enterprise , 1998, BASYS.

[21]  Panos K. Chrysanthis,et al.  Programming views for mobile database clients , 1998, Proceedings Ninth International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (Cat. No.98EX130).

[22]  Brian Jepson Java Database Programming , 1996 .

[23]  Victor W. Marek,et al.  Applications of JAVA programming language to database management , 1998, SGMD.