The University of British Columbia

We examine and contrast two interesting systems which are at the two ends of the scale in their ability to support program mobility: JAVA and WAVE. JAVA offers a useful combination of some of the most attractive features in conventional programming languages and environments. It supports distributed computing and TCP/IP protocols (e.g. HTTP), and allows transparent access to objects across the net via URLs. New interactive code modules can be dynamically loaded and linked on demand from a variety of distributed sources, thus supporting to some extent the implementation of mobile intelligent agents. WAVE, on the other hand, offers a completely new programming paradigm, which directly supports dynamic creation and processing of arbitrary knowledge networks. In WAVE, programs ( ldquo;waves rdquo;) can be injected from arbitrary points in the distributed system, roam in the network in a virus-like mode, while replicating into parallel instances, and coordinating with each other, without any centralized control. Different waves can cooperate in a distributed space, thereby forming dynamic societies which may collectively perform complex knowledge processing