Currently, we are experimenting with TACOMA agents in a World-Wide Web context. The idea is to support shipment of TACOMA agents from a WWW client to one or a series of WWW servers. The interface to a remote TACOMA installation is through the local web browser.
Applicability of this model can be in, for instance, information retrieval applications on the web. A TACOMA web crawler can now physically move about in the internet entirely disconnected from the client side machine. We also believe this feature to be important in an environment where client side nodes like, for instance a PDA or NC (Network Computer), have limited connectivity, caching and processing capacity.
Current technology as (Hot) Java supports code being shipped the other way round. This can be useful for animation or visualization purposes, where applets are run on the client side. We provide a more general processing environment where the WWW glues together a set of computers for distributed processing. Also, we only need general TACOMA support at the server side, where the TACOMA agents are run. This is opposed to a Java environment, where both the client and the server need some support.
Our TACOMA Web System is in a very experimental stage. Obviously, security is the main concern. As such, we have set up two experimental environments of the TACOMA Web System:
This service is now operational. You can send a TACOMA agent (implemented in Tcl) to the University of Tromsų fetching the current weather monitored by StormCast.
DEMO: Ship a TACOMA agent to Tromsų.