Resource Bindings

Nicola Melchiotti and I designed and developed a package that allows a mobile agents to specify how a given binding to a resource is affected by migration. The mobile agent may specify that, after migration is completed, a binding to a given resource is either

• voided, or
• maintained, thus causing the migration of the resource along with the agent, or
• substituted with a binding to a copy of the original resource, that is migrated along with the agent, or
• substituted with a binding to a resource that is compatible with the original one, or
• stretched across the network, still pointing to the original resource on the source µServer, 

according to the classification of bindings presented in:

Alfonso Fuggetta, Gian Pietro Picco, and Giovanni Vigna. "Understanding Code Mobility". 
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 342-361.

The package relies on some nice tricks that exploit Java weak references, as provided in java.lang.reference. As such, the package requires Java 1.2 or higher.

Currently, I am busy integrating Nicola's code with the new and released version of µCode. Thus, the package is not yet available for download. If you really want to mess around with the code, write me a note and I will send you whatever I have.