An Overview of AgentSpace: A Next-Generation Mobile Agent System

This paper gives an overall overview of the AgentSpace framework, a next-generation Java mobile agent system developed on top of the ObjectSpace Voyager system. We first introduce the notion of dynamic and distributed agent-based applications and argue that the AgentSpace features are suitable to support them. The AgentSpace novelties include: flexible and dynamic association between agents, security policies and users; transparency of agent location through the use of views; and easy and clean way to create agents through the use of abstract classes and method factories. The paper uses an application example to present some aspects of AgentSpace from the developer’s point of view.