The Idea: Integrating Authoring Concepts for Mobile Agents into an Authoring Tool for Active Multimedia Mail

Mobile agents are a competitive concept of client-server computing and are especially suitable in mobile environments, that are characterized by low bandwidth communication facilities and ad hoc connection/disconnection to stationary systems. They can be used for information retrieval and information filtering, in which case they evaluate replies and return only the relevant data. Mobile agents as a metaphor of active objects are created on a mobile device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), will be launched into the information galaxy and are fulfilling the mobile user ‘s task on the services available on networked stationary systems. One transmission channel for these itinerant agents is email. This paper introduces Active M 3 as an example of an active mail framework, which can be regarded as a first approach in authoring mobile agents in a graphical interactive manner. Active M 3 integrates two known concepts: active mail and multimedia mail.