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On the tools side, no discussion of agents is complete without mention of General Magic and its Telescript technology. Now in its fifth year of business, this progeny of Apple, Sony, Motorola, and AT&T has impressively regrouped after the disappointing lack of market acceptance of its super-cool, albeit proprietary, Magic Cap operating system. Tabriz, General Magic's latest technology offering, provides Internet wrappers around the company's Telescript agent scripting language and API. This time around, General Magic is opening up -- offering free Tabriz SDKs to any developer with a pulse and a business card. General Magic's newfound openness may be an example of "too little, too late," however, as Java's widespread acceptance threatens to unseat Telescript as the agent-creator toolbox.
Java's network-centricity, sandbox security model, and platform independence make the language a perfect environment in which to development agent-based tools. One such tool, IBM's Aglet Workbench, currently in alpha release, provides a laboratory for creating Java-based mobile agent applications. The Aglet Workbench defines its own Java agent API (which has been submitted to standards committees) and provides a set of tools and samples for getting started.
The term aglets is a play on words between agents and applets. There are threads of similarity (no pun intended) between Java's applet model and the IBM aglet environment. These similarities are thoroughly explored by the venerable Bill Venners, in his companion Under the Hood column in this issue of JavaWorld.
To further our exploration of mobile agents, the final sections of this article provide a series of tutorial applications written using IBM's Aglets Workbench. To use the tutorials, you should download and install the Aglets Workbench. The documentation and provided examples (which are quite good for an alpha release) should be sufficient for readers with enough background with aglets to get started with these tutorials. It is recommended that you test drive the Tahiti aglet server with a few of the bundled samples prior to digging into the tutorials.
Links to the Aglets Workbench and other information pertaining to this product are provided in the Resources section of this article.
Imagine a mobile agent that crawls the Web, searching for interesting tidbits of information. Jumping from Web site to Web site, a distributed searching agent can execute a predefined set of behaviors upon finding content of note after scanning it with a predetermined heuristic.
Contrast this to today's popular search engines, like Yahoo!, Alta Vista, or InfoSeek. These services collate and index Web-based material in a centralized data repository for searching via Web-based interfaces. After visiting one of these sites and ingesting your daily dose of Webvertising, you are given access to a search facility. Finding content in this manner requires an active presence on the part of the user. When JavaSoft releases a new API specification at its Web site (www.javasoft.com), it eventually will be found and indexed by the search engine Web crawlers, and queries to the search engine will start returning pointers to the new document.