Doug Fort of Downright Software recently announced pyagent , an XML-RPC infrastructure for independent agents. Agents, semi-autonomous programs that can perform tasks for you or make decisions for you, may act as either a server or client.
Agents reside on peer computers and communicate various kinds of information back and forth.
Agents may also initiate tasks on behalf of other peer systems. While the pyagent framework doesn't supply the intelligence, it does supply a simple means for agents to communicate. To find and communicate with each others, agents register with a locator agent. That is about the extent of the framework. Pyagent includes an example application, a chat program.