The main advantages of the mobile agent paradigm lie in its ability to move client code and computation to remote server resources, and in permitting increased asynchrony in client-server interactions. Agents can be used for information searching, filtering and retrieval, or for electronic commerce on the Web, thus acting as personal assistants for their owners. Agents can also be used in low- level network maintenance, testing, fault diagnosis, distributed collaborations, and for dynamically upgrading the capabilities of existing services. This talk presents an overview of the Ajanta system architecture and its programming model. Ajanta's programming environment is defined in terms of a set of primitive operations for agent creation, dispatch, migration and remote control.
Agents can access server resources using a proxy-based access control mechanism.
Ajanta system supports agent migration based on the composition of some basic migration patterns, which incorporate exception handling mechanisms. This talk describes several agent based distributed applications that we implemented using the Ajanta system. These include a middleware for file sharing over the Internet, a distributed calendar manager, and a collaborative authoring system. The Ajanta system is available for public use. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.