Hi Jeff,
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: Jeff Schnitzer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
[...]
> I've been giving a lot of thought to distributed object models lately.
> I've worked with DCOM, CORBA, RMI, and EJB, and for the most
> part it's a
> lot of the same. Since networks are getting so fast these days, I'm
> starting to really wonder what it would be like to have a model in
> which:
>
> * All objects are inherently remotable.
> * Objects transparently migrate for efficiency.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Mobile Agents. They suck.
In our experience, the security concerns far outweigh the advantages of
mobility. Anyways, that migration is only efficient in conditions of:
- limited processing power. Instead of making computations on a PDA,
you shift the agent to your server, perform the computations and then return
with the results. This sci-fi scenario is a bit absurd, since you can just
call a service that performs the same computations.
- limited bandwidth. You shift the agent to the machine that is
nearer to e.g. the database, so as to minimize communications. A good design
already takes care of this problem, and nowadays, bandwidth is much cheaper
than it used to be.
> I can think of many interesting, fairly revolutionary consequences of
> such a system and I'd love to discuss them. Ultimately, if such a
> system ever made it out of research and into prototype, it could
> challenge both Java and .NET, and possibly stave off the
> coming hegemony
> of the Sun/Microsoft duopoly. (Yeah, yeah, there will always
> be people
> who enjoy working on nonvirtual machines, but they're crazy :-)
You can just check out JADE, it's a nice LGPL platform for mobile agents
that can be programmed in JESS or Java. IMHO, not worth the trouble.
> Does anyone think some variant of this idea to be worth
> pursuing? Or is
> everyone wedded to the idea of working on the proprietary Sun platform
> known as Java?
It's not 'with me or against me'. We can dislike J2EE, but not necessarily
be keen on building a J2EE replacement.
Un saludo,
Alex.
