Conclusion

This thesis has described the design and development of the TAgents Mobile Agent System. The research made in the sector of Mobile Agents treats the existing systems as well as the standards. It showed the tasks that had to be accomplished to make the System compliant to the MAFFinder part of the MASIF standard and to prepare it for being compatible to it. It showed the problems and advantages which were encountered while using the Java language.

The first requirement was to build a highly extendable System. This goal was reached by designing and implementing the service - proxy mechanism described in Section . This resource maintaining design was implemented in a very general way providing the platform with the possibility to be extended with almost every kind of extension and resource access.

The other main target was to separate the execution of an Agent from the other parts of the System. To achieve this, the platform had intensively made use of threads and thread groups. Now an Agent is totally separated from the System and with an appropriate security environment also from the standard libraries of Java. The design was built as secure as it is possible with the limitations of Java in relation to thread controlling (see Section ).

The field of Mobile Agents is very new in the computer science sector. This means that the research is still going on in a fast way. This project was designed to be a base for research in Mobile Agents. When the above mentioned improvements are finished, the Agents System will be ready to prove its capability to compete with the other platforms. Some of the tasks, security and intelligent Agents, are already under work by members of the TAgents project at the Universidad Carlos III. The standard pending work will be able to be processed once the next public version of the MASIF standard from the OMG is launched. This version will probably have a lot of improvements as the knowledge of Mobile Agents improving because of the more and more currently available platforms. As the Mobile Agents technique will be more accepted in the industry the TAgents System will perhaps already be able to be considered as alternative for use in commercial environments.