Communication

The communication protocol was hard coded into the former platform. The used protocol was RMI and the whole platform was build as a RMI server and client. This would have made it very hard to implement a new communication method, like for example plain socket communication. This made the former platform very dependent to the RMI and under some circumstances it could be necessary to use another protocol for communication. For example there are a few Java implementation which do not provide a RMI service like in the palm pilot. Especially these small devices like PDAs or handhelds are one of the targets for Mobile Agent Systems. Also it could be that in some environments you have to use another protocol, because of for example a strict firewall. One of the most important reasons is the use of the CORBA protocol in the MASIF standard. When trying to use this standard one has to implement the CORBA protocol. This are the main reasons why most of the major Mobile Agent Systems are supporting more protocols like plain sockets or CORBA.

The next problem was that there was missing an asynchronous messaging method. Asynchronous messages are very important for tasks which can last much time. The messaging routines were not defined by keeping in mind to make them easy to change to be asynchronytypeset@protect @@footnote SF@gobble@opt Messaging had some implementation liimitations, like there was not returned the real result of the method invocation on the target Agent. .