Mobile agent platforms for Web databases: a qualitative and quantitative assessment

We present practical experiences gathered from the employment of two popular Java-based mobile-agent platforms, IBM´s Aglets and Mitsubishi´s Concordia. We present some basic distributed computing models and describe their adaptation to the mobile-agent paradigm. Upon these models we develop a set of frameworks for distributed database access over the World Wide Web, using IBM´s Aglets and Mitsubishi´s Concordia platforms. We compare the two platforms both quantitatively and qualitatively. For the quantitative comparison, we propose, employ, and validate an approach to evaluate and analyse mobile-agent framework performance. For the qualitative assessment, we present our observations about the programmability and robustness of, and mobility provided by, the two platforms