An agent architecture for supporting individualized services in Internet applications

This paper presents the agent architecture of an Internet application development tool called Distributed Interactive Web-site Builder (DIWB). Together with the component object model and a layering framework, the agent architecture can be used to build Internet applications that support individualized services. The DIWB can construct pages dynamically at runtime and can be easily customized for individual users. The architecture consists of two cooperating agents that compose pages at runtime using components and data stored in various databases (agencies). The page agent composes a page by retrieving page definition and requesting the component agent to construct individual components. The component agent retrieves user preferences, and page component definitions from the databases and returns the results to the page agent.