Eugene Hung University of California - San Diego, San Diego, CA
Joseph Pasquale University of California - San Diego, San Diego, CA
International World Wide Web Conference archive
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web table of contents
New York, NY, USA
SESSION: Web site analysis and customization table of contents
Pages: 694 - 703
Year of Publication: 2004
ISBN:1-58113-844-X
Abstract:
ReAgents are remotely executing agents that customize Web browsing for non-standard clients. A reAgent is essentially a one-shot" mobile agent that acts as an extension of a client dynamically launched by the client to run on its behalf at a remote more advantageous location. ReAgents simplify the use of mobile agent technology by transparently handling data migration and run-time network communications and provide a general interface for programmers to more easily implement their application-specific customizing logic. This is made possible by the identification of useful remote behaviors i.e. common patterns of actions that exploit the ability to process and communicate remotely. Examples of such behaviors are transformers monitors cachers and collators. In this paper we identify a set ofuseful reAgent behaviors for interacting with Web services via astandard browser describe how to program and use reAgents and show that the overhead of using reAgents is low and outweighed by its benefits.
My Discussion:
A highly technical paper with much description of interfaces and function calls for these proxy processes the authors call reAgents. The reAgents are spawned by an HTML form or coded by hand for the purpose of massaging the messaging between a mobile client and a website. They claim to not require a new infrastructure, but their system still requires a new class of machines to be on the network, the ReAgent hosts where the ReAGents get executed. They claim to have better scalability over standard deployed proxies, but this new set of machines wil come with its own scalability problems if Reagents take off and every mobile phone user has them to connect to their favorite website. Having ReAgents be so keyed to one website or function also doesn't support the grazing of sites many users do.
