Mobile agents for World Wide Web distributed database access

The popularity of the Web as a universal access mechanism for network infor mation has created the need for developing web-based DBMS client/server app lications. However, the current commercial applet-based approaches for acce ssing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability, and robustne ss. In this paper, we propose a new framework for Web-based distributed acc ess to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework su pports lightweight, portable, and autonomous clients as well as operation o n slow or expensive networks. The implementation of the framework using the aglet workbench shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some c ase outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up env ironments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptati on of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a f actor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. We expect our framework to perform even better when deployed using different implementation platforms as indicated by our preli minary results from an implementation based on Voyager.