Cameron Laird's personal notes on software agents

• a small, special-purpose embedded system designed to communicate filtered results to some higher-order application. Thus there might be an agent which lives at the center of a local network of intelligent sensors in a process plant; it passes a summary of their reports on to a local console, and also to a remote operations center which monitors several such plants and several networked subsystems.
• a mobile application, that is, a programmed object which is emitted from one host, travels through a network, installs itself on a target host, and begins computation. These also have the potential of detaching themselves from a current host and relocating again, as often as necessary.

  [Explain security considerations.]

  [Explain spiders.]

  [Explain NMS.]

Agent Tcl; Tcl-based work with agents has gone about as far as that implemented with any language, until the recent rise of Java as the vehicle of choice [explain JavaSpaces].