Webmages: An agent platform based on web services

WebMages (Web-based Mobile AGEnt System) is a mobile agent platform based on the integration of the mobile agent computing paradigm with Web Services. The resulting platform provides a lightweight agent run-time environment inside a web container, thus adding agent functionality to existing web servers. The platform’s components are deployed as Web Services, with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) over HTTP acting as the necessary communication channel. Potential performance enhancements related to the XML parsing of the transferred data and to the difference in performance between the Apache SOAP library and the Apache AXIS engine are also presented and discussed.