Mobile Agents

Suppose you are sitting at a bar and your cell phone rings. It tells you that there is someone sitting at the other end of the room that shares your love of opera and Chinese food, is about your age, is available, and also includes a photo. Would you like to meet them? Or you and your friends are playing a game of Risk-but with cell phones or PDAs that map you and your teammates' actual positions in real-time and let your opponents know by live video that you have just taken Nob Hill. This is not science fiction - there are companies in Silicon Valley today developing these types of applications and some of them are in use now. To make these programs and many others like them come alive will require technology that goes well beyond today's network applications such as search engines or online e-commerce. How will we design, build, and support these new types of applications? Mobile agents will play a major role in this next generation of Web-based software systems. Mobile agents are small software entities that can act as your autonomous representative. They are smart and fast, and can travel through the web, or any other network, in order to translate your specification - the "what"-into a possible solution, whether it is an order of kung pao shrimp or fifty tons of crude oil for your refinery. They take care of the "how" - they do the browsing, comparing, and negotiating. "This will be the first standard introductory book on mobile agents" -Jose Vidal, University of South Carolina