Mobile intelligent agent systems: WAVE vs. JAVA

We examine and contrast two interesting systems which are at the two ends of the scale in their ability to support program mobility: JAVA and WAVE. JAVA offers a useful combination of some of the most attractive features in conventional programming languages and environments. It supports distributed computing and TCP/IP protocols (e.g. HTTP), and allows transparent access to objects across the net via URLs. New interactive code modules can be dynamically loaded and linked on demand from a variety of distributed sources, thus supporting to some extent the implementation of mobile intelligent agents. WAVE, on the other hand, offers a completely new programming paradigm, which directly supports dynamic creation and processing of arbitrary knowledge networks. In WAVE, programs ("waves") can be injected from arbitrary points in the distributed system, roam in the network in a virus-like mode, while replicating into parallel instances, and coordinating with each other, without any centralized control. Different waves can cooperate in a distributed space, thereby forming dynamic societies which may collectively perform complex knowledge processing.