Agtivity

RAGS - Remote AGent System

[Warning: this page is outdated, but supplied for historical interest]

RAGS is my my own software agent system that is under development. I don't have any estimate of availability yet, but I do plan on focusing on the Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms.

A RAGS software agent is what I would call a "Remote Software Agent" or "Remote AGent" (RAG.) Essentially, a RAG is sent from one place to another place to be executed with some communication back to the point of origin (which could a legacy application, another agent, or a real person.) A RAG is not mobile in the sense of being able to pick itself up and move to another place once it has started executing.

The overriding design goal of RAGS is to be as simple as possible. I consider Adobe's PostScript to be a good model of providing a very sophisticated feature set with a very simple interface. The computing industry is way too full of "bloatware"; one of my missions is to counter that trend.

RAGS has a a language-neutral architecture based on agents described in source code format. A system manager on the target computer should be able to examine an incoming agent to assure that it "looks" benign before allowing it to run. Automatic filter programs could be developed to automatically check incoming agents without the interaction of a real person (or maybe only when a "suspicious-looking" agent is detected by the automatic filter.)

The initial implementation of RAGS will use my proprietary C/C++-like OOP language, Liana, but that's just to get the system up ASAP. Although everybody's talking Java and it's likely that I will eventually have to support Java, Liana is way more than functional enough than Java for agents, and besides, I think there might be even more potential for AI-based agents which would want to be written in LISP (although Liana has enough LISP-like features to handle a lot of AI applications.) And, database-oriented agents should probably be written in an SQL-like, 4GL-type language (a 6GL??) that is similar to how a "trigger" is written in SQL. The bottom line: not all agents are created equal. Different tools should be adapted to different tasks. Some agents will be hand-coded and should use an easy to read language. Some agents will be generated automatically by a computer program and should use an easy to generate language.

Sorry, but I don't have a date yet for the free, downloadable "beta" release or even the commercial (sorry, you get what you pay for, so I HAVE to charge for the real thing!) release. Stay tuned or send me email.

Please contact us with any questions or comments.

Updated: February 08, 2006 09:10:32 PM -0500