"Hucksters claim that agents can sort your mail, buy you a car, and solve your distributed computing woes -- in one fell swoop. Agents have tremendous potential to be sure, but this claim is a little far fetched -- at least today."
"He may not do those things, but a different sort of agent promises to! Acting as our own little electronic Jerry Maguires, digital agents will obediently notify us when needles of interesting information are found in the information haystack. These agents will monitor our stock quotes, surf our favorite Web sites, and filter the daily deluge of incoming e-mail and news messages. They will even act as our personal shoppers, stockbrokers, and attorneys, transacting commerce in our stead. Agents will do our dirty work, permitting us to disconnect the neural shunts that shackle us to our workstations, freeing us to commune in the majestic serenity of nature."
"Communication is just as important in the realm of software as it is in the realm of animal life. Whether the entities in question are threads, subroutines, processes, or agents, they usually find themselves in the position of needing to share data (or communicate) with others of their kind."
"We've got a lot of ground to cover, so we'd best get started. We're going to start our agent adventure with an up-close look at agent mobility. Agent mobility provides a good starting point because the problems associated with mobile (and potentially untrustworthy) code are well-known, and robust solutions are readily available. In addition, Java (via remote method invocation -- or RMI -- and object serialization) provides prefabricated tools that make the job of moving objects easier."
"You see, in order to actually do some of the things their promoters promise, agents have to be given the ability to think. And people have been trying -- with little success -- to get computers to think since the '60s."
"JVM Tool Interface (JVM TI) for JDK 5.0 and JDK 6 Transitioning from JVMPI to JVM TI Java Native Interface (JNI) for JDK 5.0 and JDK 6 Kelly O'Hair's Blog Solaris 10 OS DTrace VM Agents Project Sun Studio Performance Analyzer Java Platform Debugger Architecture: Overview Java SE Downloads"
"In theory, a software agent should be able to migrate with all its state: heap, execution stack, and registers. Some will likely consider the inability of aglets to do this as a flaw in the aglet's implementation of mobile-agent theory. This feature of aglets arises out of the architecture of the JVM, which doesn't allow a program to directly access and manipulate execution stacks. This is part of the JVM's built-in security model. Unless there is a change to the JVM, aglets and any other mobile Java-based agent will be unable to carry the state of their execution stacks with them as they migrate."
