In this paper we propose electronic contract negotiation — a sub-part of the more general area of electronic commerce — as an example application for mobile agents. We start by presenting a set of requirements that an application should fulfill in order to take advantage of mobile agents and show that not all distributed applications meet these requirements. We then present contract negotiation, an example of an application that can potentially take full advantage of mobile agents. The paper also contains an introduction to a mobile agent system being developed at Hamburg University and show how it can be used to implement contract negotiation. 1.

. In the last three years we have been working with persistence and distribution, in particular migration of higher-level objects (such as procedures) between autonomous persistent programs. In this paper we introduce persistence and the suitability of Napier88 --- the persistent system we have used for our experiments --- as an agent language. We then present a few examples of opportunities and many more challenges that exist in the combination of persistence with agents. 1 Introduction The main motivation for this paper is our perception that free variables and persistence have not been properly addressed by the agent research community. Persistence is important because many of the examples presented in the agent literature include local or remote database access. Free variables are also of interest --- and unavoidable in a persistent environment --- because data and code are highly and strongly inter-connected in the persistent store. This paper is based on our experience with pers...

Current RPC mechanisms for persistent languages are either pass by reference --- in which case they do not scale --- or pass by copy --- in which case they duplicate objects and destroy sharing relationships. In this paper we argue that to build very large distributed persistent applications a compromise between these two mechanisms is needed. The ultimate goal of our research is to build a scalable persistent RPC while still maintainingobject sharing, type safety, type completeness and semantics that are readily understood by application programmers. 1 Introduction This research concerns the construction and maintenance of long-lived, large-scale, persistent applications that store and manipulate large quantities of complex inter-related data. An example is a health-care information system managing data for hospitals, patients and doctors, and their relationships with funding and regulatory agencies. These applications can be characterised by two attributes. Persistence. They need t...

The name management capabilities currently provided by most existing persistent object systems (POSs) are rather limited. In particular, existing POSs tend to lack powerful and general mechanisms for forming, manipulating, controlling and reasoning about contexts. As a result, these POSs offer only weak or awkward support for large-scale data storage, multi-user computing, code reuse, interoperation of independently developed object stores and other similarly important classes of applications. As part of our work on improved name management for convergent computing systems, we have developed a framework for uniform treatment of the context and interface control facets of name management. In this paper we describe a realization of that framework, in the form of a shell-style user interface to a POS, that we are using to experiment both with the framework itself and with enhanced context control capabilities for POSs. 1 Introduction A convergent computing system is any system in which t...

Contents 1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 2 2 Downloading ............................................................................................................. 2 3 DEC Alpha Only ...................................................................................................... 2 4 Installing ................................................................................................................... 2 4.1 Extract the Release ................................................................................... 2 4.2 Define Shell Variables ............................................................................. 3 4.3 Install the Release .................................................................................... 3 4.4 Update Network Software ........................................................................ 3 5 Registering a Napier88 S