The new Web agents are important tools because they facilitate new uses for the Internet. For example, you can use a Web agent on a cell phone to see if your flight is on time while you're sitting in the back of a cab. Today many agents are tied to servers and accessible through Web sites. Many strategists suggest that using special Web agents, which scour e-commerce sites for the best prices, will forever change the way we make purchases. MySimon not only considers prices of products in thousands of online stores and auctions, but it also analyzes other factors that sway buyers, like shipping options and warranties.
Web agents can do much more than pull information off the Web.
Since they aren't bound by the security restrictions of browsers, agents running as Web clients blur the functional distinctions between servers and clients. They can combine data from the Internet with locally generated data, read and write to files, automatically print documents, send or receive email and faxes, or upload data to Web sites. The goal of this article is to introduce you to the basic concepts of writing intelligent Web agents, and then to point you to where you can get ideas for agents of your own design. Don't be discouraged if you're in this group because the language is very easy to learn. It only has five lines of actual code, so you might scratch your head and wonder how modern browsers justify consuming tens of megabytes of disk space.