Mobile code seems to be a promising technology which utilizes the advantages and overcomes some disadvantages of such an infrastructure. The motivation for mobile code is to move code to data sources instead of the vice verse.
[#!LaOs1998!#] gives a short overview of advantages offered by a special form of mobile code, mobile agents . Mobile agents can reduce network traffic because the communication between program and data is done through local interfaces. The local communication also overcomes communication latency, which can enhance performance especially if a big amount of data is exchanged. Another merit of mobile agents is the flexibility to update or to modify protocols. If a protocol layer is only updated or modified on the local host, but not on the remote host, a mobile agent can be sent to the remote host as mediator between the incompatible parties.
Mobile agents enable an application to execute code autonomously. After moving code over the network and initiation of the computation, the connection to the source application can be released and the mobile code continues to execute its task.
This property can make a distributed software system more robust and fault-tolerant, because the potential negative effect of poor links with low bandwidth and low reliability is reduced.