Software Update via Mobile Agent Based Programming

Lorenzo Bettini, Rocco De Nicola, Michele Loreti.

Abstract

We describe a system that permits maintaining the software installed on several heterogeneous computers distributed over a network by taking advantage of the mobile agent paradigm. The applications are installed and updated only on the central server. When a new release of an application is installed on the server, agents are scattered along the network to update the application on the clients.

To build a prototype system we use X-Klaim, a programming language specifically designed to program distributed systems composed of several components interacting through multiple tuple spaces and mobile code.