Mobile agents for Web‐based systems management

The increasing dimension and heterogeneity of global Web systems make their management with tools based on the client/server model more difficult. The mobile agent technology overcomes the limits of traditional approaches and proposes solutions that are suitable for the management of distributed and heterogeneous Internet‐based systems. The paper describes the MAMAS environment and its implementation with a mobile agent technology. MAMAS has the goals of monitoring the whole system, introducing dynamic corrective actions and modifying system policies at run‐time. MAMAS achieves these objectives by answering the guidelines of both security and compliance to standards. The choice of Java as the implementation language has made it possible to achieve portability, to exploit the language security features, and to provide Web accessibility. The MAMAS compliance with CORBA ensures interoperability with legacy management platforms.