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Fourth Annual USENIX Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1996
Agent Tcl: A flexible and secure mobile-agent system
Robert S. Gray
Department of Computer Science
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
Abstract
An information agent manages all or a portion of a user's information
space. The electronic resources in this space are often distributed
across a network and can contain tremendous quantities of data.
Mobile agents provide efficient access to such resources and are a
powerful tool for implementing information agents. A mobile agent is
an autonomous program that can migrate from machine to machine in a
heterogeneous network. By migrating to the location of a resource,
the agent can access the resource efficiently even if network
conditions are poor or the resource has a low-level interface.
Telescript is the best-known mobile-agent system. Telescript,
however, requires the programmer to learn and work with a complex
object-oriented language and a complex security model. Agent Tcl, on
the other hand, is a simple, flexible, and secure system that is based
on the Tcl scripting language and the Safe Tcl extension. In this
paper we describe the architecture of Agent Tcl and its current
implementation.
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