Is Code Still Moving Around? Looking Back at a Decade of Code Mobility

In the mid-nineties, mobile code was on the rise and, in particular, there was a growing interest in autonomously moving code components, called mobile agents. In 1997, we published a paper that introduced the concept of mobile code paradigms, which are design patterns that involve code mobility. The paradigms highlighted the locations of code, resources, and execution as first-class abstractions. This characterization proved useful to frame mobile code designs and technologies, and also as a basis for a quantitative analysis of applications built with them. Ten years later, things have changed considerably. In this paper we present our view of how mobile code evolved and discuss which paradigms succeeded or failed in supporting effectively distributed applications.