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Solve real problems with aglets, a type of mobile agent

Part 2 of this series explains the significance of mobile agents, such as aglets -- IBM Japan's Java-based, autonomous software agent technology

By Bill Venners, JavaWorld.com, 05/01/97

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Page 5 of 5

Mobile agents may simply represent another step in the evolution of the object-oriented paradigm. Aglets are Java objects that can autonomously move from host to host. Like a traditional object, an aglet has state, behavior, and identity. Unlike a traditional object, however, an aglet also has location.

Next month

Next month will be the final article in my long series that covers Java bytecodes. It will discuss the various ways the Java virtual machine invokes methods.

About the author

Bill Venners has been writing software professionally for 12 years. Based in Silicon Valley, he provides software consulting and training services under the name Artima Software Company. Over the years he has developed software for the consumer electronics, education, semiconductor, and life insurance industries. He has programmed in many languages on many platforms: assembly language on various microprocessors, C on Unix, C++ on Windows, Java on the Web. He is author of the book: Inside the Java Virtual Machine, published by McGraw-Hill.
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Resources
  • Previous Under The Hood articles:
  • The lean, mean virtual machine -- Gives an introduction to the Java virtual machine.
  • The Java class file lifestyle -- Gives an overview to the Java class file, the file format into which all Java programs are compiled.
  • Java's garbage-collected heap -- Gives an overview of garbage collection in general and the garbage-collected heap of the Java virtual machine in particular.
  • Bytecode basics -- Introduces the bytecodes of the Java virtual machine, and discusses primitive types, conversion operations, and stack operations in particular.
  • Floating Point Arithmetic -- Describes the Java virtual machine's floating-point support and the bytecodes that perform floating point operations.
  • Logic and Arithmetic -- Describes the Java virtual machine's support for logical and integer arithmetic, and the related bytecodes.
  • Objects and Arrays -- Describes how the Java virtual machine deals with objects and arrays, and discusses the relevant bytecodes.
  • Exceptions -- Describes how the Java virtual machine deals with exceptions, and discusses the relevant bytecodes.
  • Try-Finally -- Describes how the Java virtual machine implements try-finally clauses, and discusses the relevant bytecodes.
  • Control Flow -- Describes how the Java virtual machine implements control flow and discusses the relevant bytecodes.
  • The Architecture of Aglets-- Describes the inner workings of Aglets, IBM's autonomous Java-based software agent technology.