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Agent Programming and Scripting languages
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Vince Delle Donne, Daniel Gauvin and Hervé Marchal of CRIM (Computer Research center In Montreal)
have developed LALO,
a language and a framework for developing intelligent multiagents
systems. LALO is a language which uses the
Agent Oriented Programming (AOP) paradigm as defined by Yoav
Shoam. In AOP, an agent is determined by it beliefs, his capabilities,
and his commitments, which together comprise its mental
state. AOP encourages a social view of computation in which
communities of agents interact by exchanging information, sending
specific requests, offering services, accepting or refusing tasks,
competing with each other for a task to be accomplished or cooperating
with each other. A program written in LALO is translated into C++
source code, and then may be compiled with your regular C++ compiler.
The agents communicate with KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation
Language). The LALO framework is available on UNIX platforms, Windows
NT and Windows 95. Send email to
lalo@crim.ca for more information.
12/11/96
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IBM has released a new version of their Agent Building
Environment -- a toolkit for software developers that makes it
easy to build an application based on agents, or to add them to an
existing application. In the alpha version, the intelligent agent
watches for a certain condition, decides what to do based on the rules
you've given it, and triggers an action as a result. This developer
kit comes with a number of pre-built parts which make it easy for you
to add agent technology to applications. The "central intelligence"
brain for the agent is based on reasoning engine and adapter
technologies from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Lab. "Adapters" or
interfaces allow the agent to interact with the rest of the world. The
HTTP adapter, for instance, interfaces with the world-wide-web. The
NNTP adapter interfaces with internet USENET news services, and the
timer adapter allows events to be triggered based on time. You can
write your own adapters, as well, and guidelines and a sample adapter
are provided. Custom adapters can be written in either C++ or Java **.
A simple full-screen interface is also provided to allow you to
specify the rules for the agent's behavior. 12/7/96
- People building agents in Java may find these two Prolog
interpreters written in Java of interest. W-Prolog is a
simple interpreter for a pure subset of Prolog which runs as an applet
or as a stand-alone application. jProlog is
an interpreter by Paul Tarau and Bart Demoen which uses a compiler to
produce faster code. It is close to Clocksin-Mellish Prolog, with
lots of the typical builtins. You need a Prolog system (e.g., SICStus,
BinProlog, BIMprolog) to get it to work. 12/2/96
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General Magic announced and is shipping two Telescript-based products
in a new line of Tabriz
software for the web which "transform passive networks and
applications into active, secure processes for competitive advantage."
Tabriz AgentWare is general-purpose software that enables the
creation and interaction of "processes" that can occur and interact
with one another, even while users requesting the processes aren't
actively connected to a network. Processes can be requests for
information, authorization and verification and other tasks that are
part of a larger goal. The technologies used to build AgentWare
result in processes that are active, secure and persistent across the
Internet, the World Wide Web and corporate intranets-processes that
can be used to build a new, superior class of applications. Tabriz
Agent Tools is an integrated, graphical set of tools for creating,
debugging and maintaining Tabriz applications. Tabriz Agent Tools is
available now as a UNIX System application; a beta release of a
version for Windows NT is expected to ship this Autumn. Tabriz Agent
Tools provides a source-code editor, a class browser, a source-level
debugger and features for managing the components used to build Tabriz
applications.8/10/96
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Phantom is an interpreted language designed for
large-scale, interactive, distributed applications such as distributed
conferencing systems, multi-player games, and collaborative work
tools. Phantom combines the distributed lexical scoping semantics of
Obliq with a substantial language core. The language core is based on
a safe, extended subset of Modula-3, and supports a number of modern
programming features, including static typing with implicit
declarations, objects, lightweight threads, and higher-order functions
and lambda expressions. 7/27/96
- IBM's RAISE-based AgentBuilder
Product now available as Alpha version. AgentBuilder is an extensible
C++ class library for enhancing applications, especially
network-centric applications, with embedded intelligent agents.
AgentBuilder has innovative technology for agents to perform
reasoning, and for agents to be embedded closely and flexibly with a
variety of applications and software environments. 7/27/96
- Bits & Pixels's Java Intelligent Agent Library ($179)
provides components for building intelligent agents, implemented
entirely in Java. The library is a collection of over 150 java classes
covering various aspects of building intelligent agents. In addition
to agent communication and data handling facilities, the library
contains rule-based and neural net-based processing modules. There is
also an extensive modeling facility for prototyping agent interactions
and graphical classes for creating static and animated interactive
displays. 7/21/96
- Technology: Sun has released Tcl Plug-ins
for Netscape Navigator, making it possible to create Web pages that
include Tcl/Tk scripts. This provides an interesting alternative to
the use of Java applets for Web-based agent programs. Sun's current
version of the Tcl plug-in runs only with Netscape Navigator under
Solaris, Macintosh, and Windows with support for other browsers and
operating systems planned. 9/11/96
- Technology: IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory is making available
an early release of their Aglets Library for programming mobile agents
in Java(tm). The package is based on JDK 1.0.2 and Object
Serialization in the RMI package from JavaSoft. The first beta release
includes Java packages, documentation, and a demo applications.
7/9/96
- Technology: IBM has released an alpha version of AgentBuilder, a
developer's toolkit for building agent-based systems. The OS/2
version is curretnly available for download over
Internet. AgentBuilder is based in great part on the research version
of the RAISE (Reusable Agent Intelligence Software Environment) class
library developed at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center by Benjamin
Grosof, David W. Levine, Hoi Y. Chan, and others. 7/2/96
- Technology:
Jess is a clone of the core of the CLIPS expert
system shell written by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National
Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Jess contains only the essential
features of CLIPS, and leaves out a lot (e.g., COOL) but it is a
powerful, fast, and efficient tool with many applications. Jess is
downward compatible with CLIPS, in that every valid Jess script is a
valid CLIPS script. Like CLIPS, Jess uses the Rete algorithm to
process rules, a very efficient mechanism for solving the difficult
many-to-many matching problem. 6/22/96
- Penguin
is a Perl 5 module that provides a set of functions to (1) send
encrypted, digitally signed perl code to a remote machine to be
executed; and (2) receive code and, depending on who signed it,
execute it in an arbitrarily secure, limited compartment. The
combination of these functions enable direct perl coding of algorithms
to handle safe internet commerce, mobile information-gathering agents,
"live content" web browser helper apps, distributed load-balanced
computation, remote software update, distance machine administration,
content-based information propagation, Internet-wide shared-data
applications, network application builders, and so on. 6/16/96
- Aglets is the
name of a Java class library for mobile Internet agents developed at
the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory. An aglet is a persistent and
transportable Java(tm) object that executes asynchronously on the host
computer in an execution context. The execution context provides a
secure environment, protecting both the host computer system and the
aglet from malicious aglets. 5/14/96
- Technology: HORB is a
free package that supports distributed Java programming -- e.g.,
remote object creation, remote method call, and object passing. HORB
consists of the HORBC compiler, the HORB server (a kind of ORB, Object
Request Broker), and the HORB class library. Java objects compiled by
the HORBC compiler are ready to be used in distributed environments.
HORB works with the Javac compiler, Java interpreter and Java system
classes distributed by Sun. For details, see The
Magic Carpet for Network Computing: HORB Flyer's Guide, HIRANO
Satoshi, 1996/03/21 for HORB 1.2. 5/23/96
- Technology:
Autonomous Agent Programming using Java. The Applied Internet
Technologies branch of SAIC has developed a framework in Java for the
development of autonomous agents. We have provided links to the
documentation of the Framework. 5/11/96
- Technology: Java-To-Go
- Itinerative Computing Using Java. Java-To-Go is an experimental
infrastructure developed by William Li (wli@eecs.berkeley.edu) that
assists in the development and experimentation of mobile agents and
agent-based applications for itinerative computing (itinerative
computing: the set of applications that requires site-to-site
computations. Sites are usually traversed in sequence by a single
mobile agent or in parallel by a group of agents). Agents are given
the freedom to perform active computations (that is, computations are
initiated by the agents at its volition) at one or more remote agent
servers. In contrast, standard Java applets can only be invoked
passively. 5/11/96
- Technology: Ftp Software has released the CyberAgent Software Development
Kit which provides numerous agent classes designed to expedite the
development of Java-based mobile agents. The CyberAgent classes
include templates to create an intelligent agent, start an agent, stop
an agent, define a travel plan, allow access to OLE-enabled
applications, and support secure agent communications. You can also
use the agent classes with various third-party Java integrated
development environments (IDEs). 5/11/96
- Technology:
Oracle Web Agent is a generic procedural gateway, which seamlessly
invokes Oracle stored procedures, and provides an object-oriented,
user-extendible framework for producing dynamic HTML pages using
Oracle's PL/SQL scripting language. The Oracle Web Agent is
implemented using CGI, enabling it to function with any Web
Server. 5/11/96
- Paper:
Distributed Active Objects, Marc H. Brown and Marc A. Najork, DEC
SRC Report #141a, April 15, 1996, 21 pages. Abstract: Many Web
browsers now offer some form of active objects, written in a variety
of languages, and the number of types of active objects are growing
daily in interesting and innovative ways. This report describes our
work on Oblets, active objects that are distributed over multiple
machines. Oblets are written in Obliq, an object-oriented scripting
language for distributed computation. The high-level support provided
by Oblets makes it easy to write collaborative and distributed
applications. 5/10/96
- Technology: Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) points out
that Sun has some tools for creating Tcl extensions in Java. This
sounds quite useful for building agent-oriented code. See
ftp://ftp.sunlabs.com/pub/tcl/tcljava*. 3/7/96
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Language Support for Mobile Agents, Fritz Knabe,
Ph.D. Dissertation, CMU. 1/19/95
- Sun Labs has built most of the concepts of Safe-Tcl into Tcl 7.5 , now
available in as an alpha release. In addition to running on PCs and
Macs (with a Motif look and feel), this new version lets you
dynamically load binaries and create additional interpreters and
execute untrusted scripts using a generalization of Borenstein's and
Rose's Safe-Tcl. Ray Johnson (Raymond.Johnson@Eng.Sun.COM) reports
that they have some examples of it running with a web browser and are
considering creating a Netscape Plug-in to run safe Tcl scripts (See
http://www.sunlabs.com:80/research/tcl/java.html for a discussion
of the relationship between Tcl/Tk and Java) and planning on doing
some work with Safe-Tk. 1/16/95
- Agent
Tcl is a transportable agent system in which the agents are
written in Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0. Agent Tcl is under continuous use at
Dartmouth in a range of information-retrieval and
information-management applications. It is roughly analagous to
Telescript except that it uses Tcl, is lightweight, and *currently*
provides limited security. An alpha release is now available which
runs on standard Unix platforms. 12/11/95
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Facile is a high-level, higher-order programming language for
systems that require a combination of complex data manipulation and
concurrent and distributed computing. It combines Standard ML (SML),
with a model of higher-order concurrent processes based on CCS. Facile
is being used at ECRC to develop Mobile Service Agents
. 12/6/95.
- Telescript
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Mobile Code -- a comparison of a number of languages for mobile
code, including Java, safe-Tcl, Python, Scheme48, Obliq, LogicWare,
and others. 10/21/95
- The Oz Programming
System offers a concurrent constraint programming language
designed for applications that require complex symbolic computations,
organization into multiple agents, and soft real-time control. DFKI
Oz is an interactive implementation of Oz with a full programming
environment including object-oriented interface to Tcl/Tk and powerful
interoperability features. Applications DFKI Oz has already been used
for include simulations, multi-agent systems, natural language
processing, virtual reality, graphical user interfaces, scheduling,
placement problems, and configuration.10/4/95
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General Magic's Telescript and Magic Cap. 7/21/95 (GM is
holding a developers conference on October 29-31, 1995 in San Jose.
There is a press
release and a detailed description of the conference schedule
10/4/95
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Actalk is a testbed for modeling, classifying and experimenting
with object-oriented concurrent programming languages. 7/17/95
- The
Agents Kernel Language (AKL) is a concurrent constraint
programming language developed at the Swedish Institute of Computer
Science (SICS).
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April: Agent
Process Interaction Language, Frank McCabe and Keith Clark. "In
this paper we introduce key features of a programming language for
building DAI and other types of distributed applications requiring the
transmission and manipulation of complex symbolic data. The language
is high-level and yet also offers a simple and smooth interface to
other programming languages such as ``C''. April is oriented to the
implementation of multi-agent systems. However, April is NOT a
`multi-agent applications language'. It does not directly offer high
level features such as: planners, problem solvers and knowledge
representation systems that a multi-agent applications language might
be expected to include. April is more an object based concurrent
language with objects as processes. This is a highly suitable base for
extension to DAI and multi-agent application platforms."
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Obliq is a lexically-scoped untyped interpreted language that
supports distributed object-oriented computation.
- Fresco
is a CORBA-based language iplemented in C++ which provides support for
object distribution, a standard high-level notation for object
definition, Tcl-based scripting and multi-threading.
- Safe TCL in
postscript, or
text. ALso see enabled
mail.,
agent tcl.
- Scheme 48
- The Python Programming
Language
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