Hi Neil and Noel<div> Thanks so much for those valuable suggests you gave. I've been reading several old papers from ieee about "mobile agent" per se, then as you pointed out, I'd start to feed with some background on "distributed objects". And you're right, I'll also need to scout out the topic, my current idea in mind is apply mobile agent technology within mobile computing, about which I've been able to find a couple of papers fortunately, then hopefully I could get a right advisor :)</div>
<div> Now I feel pretty sure I will use Racket as the language for my future research work for the sake of what you've mentioned here (I've already tasted the sweet provided by Racket web server :) ), the only concern I have is the portability (gc, jit, ffi, gui, in particular), but I'll figure them out by myself anyway.</div>
<div> Thanks again for all your words :)</div><div><br></div><div>Nevo</div><div> <br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On 5 January 2011 16:17, Neil Van Dyke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:neil@neilvandyke.org" target="_blank">neil@neilvandyke.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
If you wanted to build a new mobile agents framework for research
purposes, I think that using Racket would be viable.<br>
<br>
Some relevant features that Racket gives you atop what typical Scheme
dialects/derivatives do include: greater ability to limit resources,
the serializable continuations work for the Racket Web Server, good
support for defining and mixing languages (or constructing eval
environments, if you like).<br>
<br>
Also, if you are doing your academic research on a small niche like
mobile agents, you will especially want to get connected with the right
research circle. Over ten years ago (when I last kept up with the
topic), the mobile agents community was small, and there was a private
email list shared among key researchers, but the email list seems to
have moved ("mobility" pun) or disappeared. I don't know whether work
on this topic is still active, or whether the topic has morphed into
something else. I suggest finding and reading all the conference and
workshop proceedings, as well as trying out any prototypes and tools
you can find. After you've ingested all you can find, you might try
contacting a couple of the people whose work most interests you, to
express your interest and ask for advice on how to proceed.<br>
<br>
In addition to the topic of "mobile agents", also spend some time
getting background on "distributed objects", if you have not done so
already.<br>
<br>
Oh, before you do too much more reading and playing with software,
perhaps you should write down your perspective on mobile agents and why
it interests you, as notes to yourself. Then you can refer back to
those notes after being overwhelmed with other people's perspectives,
so that you don't forget ideas that others might have missed or failed
to follow through on. (It is not uncommon for lots of people to have
similar grand visions of a research topic, and for there to be lots of
hype on a topic for a while, but then the hype dies down, and those
people graduate and/or switch to new topics before they've achieved the
grand vision for the previous topic. That doesn't mean the previous
topic is uninteresting or insoluble, nor that the dominant approaches
during the hype were the best ones.)<br>
<br>
Also, once you've scouted out the topic, be sure to get an academic
research advisor, if you don't already have one. Besides topical and
general research direction, s/he can advise you about funding.<br>
<br>
Good luck.<br>
<br>
<br>
Nevo wrote at 01/05/2011 02:04 AM:
<div><div></div><div><blockquote type="cite">hi,
<div> I'm new to mobile agent, but i'm interested in that and plan
to continue my study on that if possible. Now I'm required to prepare a
proposal related with mobile agent and I want to use racket as the
implementation language, but i'm not sure if this is really applicable,
so i'm asking here for some suggest.</div>
<div> As the background reading, I've been briefly read papers "<a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1555148" target="_blank">Scheme
implementation of the functional language for mobile agents with
dynamic extension</a>" and "<a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/%7Eknabe/dissertation.ps.gz" target="_blank">Language
Support for Mobile Agents,</a>". Both implementation are based on
functional programming language, so I feel it should be feasible in
Racket as well. After further searching, it seems IBM's "<a href="http://www.trl.ibm.com/aglets/" target="_blank">Aglets</a>"
is the most popular implementation, in Java, and Python also has a
prototyping framework <a href="http://maf.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">MAF</a> which supports "foreign
agent", and <a href="https://www.taupro.com/ss/pyrover.html" target="_blank">Pyrover</a> which I
cannot open the link for (just read the cached page). I'm wondering is
there any similar framework or implementation in scheme or racket I can
reference from ? Thanks!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Nevo</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div>