WebVector: agents with URLs

Abstract

Emerging web applications demand considerable network resources and, especially in science and engineering, considerable computational resources. The use of agents can eliminate bottlenecks in both areas, provided that their methods of computation and communication are not overly restricted. WebVector is an agent system that combines a flexible communication model with URL-based agent identification. Within this framework, resources can be centralized to support the current web-browser security model or distributed for efficiency. Interfacing with existing software can be as simple as adding a hyperlink to a file. We concentrate on cooperative applications: uploadable active resources, flexible multicast for maintaining shared-space state, and a variety of applications from distributed computation.