Mobility and coordination for distributed Java applications

A mobile agent is a piece of code which can move among the nodes of a netwo rk of computers, looking for data and services. There are currently several programming languages and systems to develop applications including mobile agents. They are widely different, and it is not easy to understand how th ey differ. We propose a taxonomy classifying different kinds of mobile enti ties according to how they can move and how they can interact with their en vironment. We then introduce Macondo, a platform for mobile agents including interacti on primitives based on coordination technology. In fact, Macondo is based o n MJada: a coordination tool for Java extended to deal with agent mobility. We use our taxonomy of mobility to compare Macondo with other well known s ystems to program mobile agents.