Mobile Streams: a middleware for reconfigurable distributed scripting

A large class of distributed applications follow an event-driven or reactive paradigm. Such applications can benefit from mobile agent technology by making it easy to add reconfigurability, extensibility and failure resilience features at an application level. We present the design of middleware for building reactive, extensible, reconfigurable distributed systems, based upon an abstraction which we call Mobile Streams. Using our system, a distributed, event-driven application can be scripted from a single point of control and dynamically extended and reconfigured while it is executing. Our system is suitable for building a wide variety of applications; for example, distributed testing, conferencing and control-oriented applications. We illustrate the use of our system by presenting example applications