A flexible mobile-agent framework for accessing information systems in disconnected computing environments

Over the last few years, the importance of mobile computing has been steadily increasing. While it is important to provide support for accessing databases in disconnected computing environments, many of the information systems being deployed today are using a three-tier architecture. It is becoming vital to find ways of providing reliable access to the business logic present in the middle-tier for mobile applications. The authors present a component based framework that enables client applications to send mobile agents to interact with application servers in disconnected computing environments. This framework allows the applications to benefit from the advantages of using mobile agents in disconnected computing environments, and at the same time provides integration between mobile clients and corporate information systems.