Fourth Annual USENIX Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1996 ## Agent Tcl: A flexible and secure mobile-agent system Robert S. Gray Department of Computer Science Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire #### Abstract An information agent manages all or a portion of a user's information space. The electronic resources in this space are often distributed across a network and can contain tremendous quantities of data. Mobile agents provide efficient access to such resources and are a powerful tool for implementing information agents. A mobile agent is an autonomous program that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. By migrating to the location of a resource, the agent can access the resource efficiently even if network conditions are poor or the resource has a low-level interface. Telescript is the best-known mobile-agent system. Telescript, however, requires the programmer to learn and work with a complex object-oriented language and a complex security model. Agent Tcl, on the other hand, is a simple, flexible, and secure system that is based on the Tcl scripting language and the Safe Tcl extension. In this paper we describe the architecture of Agent Tcl and its current implementation. View the full text of this paper in ASCII (53,579 Bytes) and POSTSCRIPT (213,249 Bytes) form. To Become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

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