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"Tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of points of view. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing." -- Vernor Vinge, "A Fire Upon The Deep"
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mobilis "the mobile
computing lifestyle magazine" is a free magazine available exclusively
on the Web. In the June 1996 issue they feature mobilis
Reader Interview: General Magic's Jim White by mobilis Readers.
Abstract: "For the past couple of months, mobilis has offered you the
unique opportunity to directly interview Jim White, General Magic Vice
President of Telescript Technology. We selected a representative
sample of the questions we received and Jim has been kind enough to
respond very completely to all of the questions. So here now, without
further delay, is your interview of Jim White."
Edupage (6/16/96), reports that "WIRELESS E-MAIL WITH AN
ATTITUDE. RadioMail Corp. now
includes "agent" software with its wireless news and e-mail service,
allowing users to launch Web "agents" that are programmed to seek out
and download only the information that has been specified. The
service runs on a variety of wireless networks, including Motorola's
wireless service and RAM Mobile Data. (Investor's Business Daily 17
Jun 96 A8)". On closer examination
it's clear that Radiomail is just offering a URL retrieval by email
service to its customers.
Internet
Trends, A.M.Rutkowski , V.P. Internet Business Development,
General Magic, Inc. Abstract: This analysis and material is made
available to the Internet community by General Magic, Inc., - scaling
the Internet and enhancing access through its open Internet
technologies, including MagicCap personal communicator, Telescript
intelligent agent, and Active Web applications platforms. The material
may be copied and distributed providing attribution is given to the
sources.
Mole is a Java-based mobile agent system developed at the
University of Stuttgart. Mole is available as Java source code under
a free internal use license for non-commercial purposes and is based
on JDK 1.0.2. It requires the JavaSoft RMI
package, so probably only runs on Solaris and Windows NT/95. Some of
the features are: migration of Java Agents (code and data but no
threads); communication between agents via messages and Java RPC;
secure agent execution; controlled access to system resources via
system agents; agents are addressed by their name and the DNS name of
the "location" they reside on ; and local yellow pages service for
services provided and requested by agents.
Aglets is the
name of a Java class library for mobile Internet agents developed at
the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory. An aglet is a persistent and
transportable Java(tm) object that executes asynchronously on the host
computer in an execution context. The execution context provides a
secure environment, protecting both the host computer system and the
aglet from malicious aglets.
David Wells (wells@objs.com) of Object
Services and Consulting, Inc. has produced a nice survey on
software Wrappers.
Wrappers are "a type of software "glueware" that is used to attach
together other software components. A wrapper encapsulates a single
data source to make it usable in a more convenient fashion than the
original unwrapped source; this distinguishes wrappers from another
kind of glue-ware, mediators, that combine data from different data
sources. Wrappers are assumed to be "simple", although there is no
clear demarcation between what belongs in a "simple" wrapper and a
"complex" higher level component. Wrappers can be used to present a
simplified interface, to encapsulate diverse sources so that they all
present a common interface, to add functionality to the data source,
or to expose some of the data source's internal interfaces."
WAVE is a
computational framework and language which supports the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures on a telecommunications network. It
is being developed at the University of Surrey and Universitat
Karlsruhe. "WAVE is both a new model and information technology
oriented on coordination and control of large open systems supported
by computer and telecommunication networks. It permits the dynamic
creation of intelligent, highly parallel and distributed knowledge
processing and control structures which may evolve with the systems
supervised. These structures may provide self-organization and
self-recovery from complex failures as well as form the basis for
integration of other (distributed and heterogeneous) systems. This
technology is based on installing multiple copies of intelligent
agents throughout the distributed systems which can do local data
processing, exchange information with other subsystems and between
themselves, as well as interpret a special navigational WAVE
language. A recursive code written in this language is dynamically
self-spreading in a system space (like a virus) in a parallel and
cooperative mode governing the overall system behavior."
Experimental software is available as WAVE 0.63: Distributed WAVE
Interpretation System 0.63
Penguin is a
Perl 5 module that provides a set of functions to (1) send encrypted,
digitally signed Perl code to a remote machine to be executed; and (2)
receive code and, depending on who signed it, execute it in an
arbitrarily secure, limited compartment. The combination of these
functions enable direct Perl coding of algorithms to handle safe
internet commerce, mobile information-gathering agents, "live content"
web browser helper apps, distributed load-balanced computation, remote
software update, distance machine administration, content-based
information propagation, Internet-wide shared-data applications,
network application builders, and so on.