Approaches to Building Applications
Notes:
Virtual comunity of dynamic services
In “the old days” (of which there still remain many remnants...), programmers constructed large monolithic applications which ran standalone on a desktop computer. Object oriented technology encouraged improved code reusability somewhat, allowing a large program to be constructed from many individual components. However, the interactions among components were hard-coded by programmers. Distributed object frameworks enable the component pieces to be spread across multiple computers, but the inflexible interaction problem remains.
Current technology is not suitable to the dynamic nature of the Internet, where new, unimagined resources become available every day, and other network services disappear. What is required is the ability to create programs from a dynamic, virtual communities of services which cooperate and interact in a flexible manner. This is one of the major goals of the Open Agent Architecture