Abstracts of the ECOOP'96 Workshop on Mobile Object Systems
A Characterization of Mobility and State Distribution in Mobile
Code Languages
Gianpaolo Cugola, Carlo Ghezzi, Gian Pietro Picco and Giovanni Vigna
The growing importance of telecommunication networks has stimulated
research on a new generation of programming languages. Such languages
view the network and its resources as a global environment in which
computations take place. In particular, they support the notion of code
mobility and state distribution. To understand, discuss, evaluate, and
compare such languages, it is necessary to develop an abstract model
that allows the meaning of mobility and state distribution to be defined
precisely. The purpose of this paper is to provide such a model and to
apply it to the analysis of a number of existing new languages.
Protected and Secure Mobile Object Computing in PLANET
Kazuhiko Kato, Kunihiko Toumura, Katsuya Matsubara, Susumu Aikawa,
Jun Yoshida, Kenji Kono, Kenjiro Taura and Tatsurou Sekiguchi
Worldwide networks such as the Internet are becoming very popular, so
distributed computing environments for such networks are in high demand.
We think the design of such an environment should be based on a
mobile-object computing model and are therefore designing a
mobile-object system called Planet. One of the most significant issues
in designing mobile object systems for world-wide networks is to provide
the control needed to assure the protection and security of mobile
objects and of computing resources. In this paper we describe our
approach to this issue.
Mole - A Java Based Mobile Agent System
Markus Straßer, Joachim Baumann and Fritz Hohl
Mobile agents are active, autonomous objects, which are able to move
between locations in a so-called agent system, a distributed abstraction
layer providing security of the underlying systems on one hand and the
concepts and mechanisms for mobility and communication on the other
hand. In this paper, the mobility, the communication concepts and the
architecture of Mole, an agent system developed at the University of
Stuttgart, are presented.
Combining Mobile Agents with Persistent Systems: Opportunities
and Challenges
Miguel Mira da Silva and Malcolm Atkinson
In the last three years we have been working with persistence and
distribution, in particular migration of higher-level objects (such as
procedures) between autonomous persistent programs. In this paper we
introduce persistence and the suitability of Napier88, the persistent
system we have used for our experiments, as an agent language. We then
present a few examples of opportunities and many more challenges that
exist in the combination of persistence with agents.
Secure Object Spaces
Jan Vitek
Mobile software agents are computational entities acting on the behalf
of a user which may move from computer to computer over a heterogeneous
network, draw on local resources, and interact with other agents. This
extended abstract discusses agent communication and its implications for
security.
Designing agents for archie and ftp sessions in Obliq
Cristian Ionitoiu
This extended abstract presents a solution based on mobile agents for
archie/ftp sessions on Internet. Due to the increased rate of
interactivity, which imposes relatively long connection periods,
required by these services, their use is not appropriate for mobile
stations. This solution provides mobile user access to these services
while keeping a low rate of the connections.
A Type-Based Implementation of a Language With Distributed Scope
Dominic Duggan and Piotr Przybylski
The ML programming language has several features that make it desirable
as a language for distributed application programming. It supports
first-class closures, which are useful for distributed scope and mobile
agents. Type inference removes much of the tedium of lower-level
programming, without compromising reliability. Finally ML provides a
powerful type system, including type polymorphism. A dialect of ML
intended for distributed application programming is introduced. A
distinguishing characteristic of this implementation is the use of
run-time type information, motivated by several constructs in the
language. This is intended to motivate the use of run-time types in
implementations of polymorphic languages intended for distributed
programming.