Java-based mobile agents
David Chi-Leung Wong, Noemi Paciorek, Dana Moore · Communications of the ACM · 1999
The mobile agent concept grows out of three earlier technologies: process migration [5], remote evaluation [7], and mobile objects [3]-all developed to improve on remote procedure calling (RPC) for distributed programming.Early systems supporting process migration allowed an entire address space to be moved from one computer to another.One goal of this mechanism was to reduce network bandwidth (compared to RPC) when multiple RPC calls are needed to execute an application.While process migration allowed an entire process to be transferred to a remote host, this mechanism did not allow an easy way to return data back to the source node without the entire process returning as well (see Figure 1).Next came remote evaluation programming, allowing one computer to send another computer a request in the form of a program (rather than an entire process address space).The remote computer receiving such a request executes the program referenced in the request within its own local address space and returns the results to the sending computer.Remote evaluation systems improved on