One curious feature of search engines is that they remember stuff better than you do. I bumped into this truth earlier this morning, while testing the new a9.com search engine from Amazon. I naturally(?) began by searching for my name. After getting the usual hits, I found a bunch of stuff I’d never seen before – things like email exchanges about the NFS implementation in the BSD/386 distribution, and JXTA discovery. And then I came across this article by James Odell from 2002: Objects and Agents Compared. This post-dated my active involvement in the autonomous agents community, but nonetheless James quoted me twice – and both seem relevant to my recent pieces on software engineering, such as this.
On synchronous vs. asynchronous interactions:
According to Geoff Arnold of Sun Microsystems, “Just as the object paradigm forced us to rethink our ideas about the proper forms of interaction (access methods vs. direct manipulation, introspection, etc.), so agents force us to confront the temporal implications of interaction (messages rather than RMI, for instance)”.
On typing:
Geoff Arnold has considered the question of third party interactions which are very hard for strongly typed object systems to handle. Here, two patterns come to mind. The first involves a broker that accepts a request and delegates it to a particular service provider based on some algorithm that is independent of the type of service interface (e.g., cost, reachability). The second involves an anonymizer that hides the identity of a requester from a service provider. Models based on strong typing, such as CORBA, RMI, and Jini, cannot easily support these patterns.
Hmmm. I wonder what else I said. In the meantime, I’ll happily cite myself as these issues unfold….