Aglets Are Open Source Now!
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What are Aglets?
Aglets are autonomous mobile software agents, which are programs that can be dispatched from one computer and transported to a remote computer for execution. Arriving at the remote computer, they present their credentials and obtain access to local services and data. The remote computer may also serve as a broker by bringing together agents with similar interests and compatible goals, thus providing a meeting place at which agents can interact.
An aglet has the following characteristics:
- Object-passing capability. It is a complete program object with its own methods, data states, and travel itinerary that can send other aglets or pass itself along in a network as an entity.
- Autonomous. An aglet has the ability to decide on its own what actions to take and where and when to go elsewhere.
- Interaction with other program objects. It can interact locally with other aglets or stationary objects. When necessary, it can dispatch itself or other aglets to remote locations to interact with other objects there.
- Disconnected operation. If a computer is currently disconnected from the network, the aglet can schedule itself to move when the computer is reconnected.
- Parallel execution. Multiple aglets can be dispatched to run concurrently in different computers.
Read more about Aglets at Aglets.org and TRL Aglets web page (where Aglets were developed).
What is Open Source?
The basic idea behind open source is the following: When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
The open-source community believes that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
Read more about Open Source at Opensource.org.
Download
The most recent Aglets Software Development Kit (ASDK), Version 1.1 Beta 3, is available as binary build and of course as source code on Sourceforge.net:
- Binary builds.
- Source code from the CVS respository. Or browse the code directly from their Web interface!
Plans for the future
- Currently the Aglets.org team is still forming and working our the procedures for the project, so only the project admins and developers have write access to the aglets source. In the coming months we will welcome new members who wish to contribute their changes, fixes, and new ideas to the project and become a team member themselves. In the meantime please don't hesitate to submit any ideas or interest in becoming a developer!
- Nightly builds and/or CVS exports of the source, with install packages and install scripts for both wintel and *nix.
- Migrate to Java 2.
- Integrate more standards.
- Aglets.net, a network of publically available aglets servers.
License
The Aglets software is licensed under the IBM Public License, which has been approved by the Open Source Initiative. Here are other IBM Open Source projects.
Contact
Please contact the Aglets.org team if you have new ideas for Aglets, if you want to become a developer, or for any kind of feedback!