The purpose of this section is to define the term mobile code and to give an overview of technologies and concepts used in the area of mobile code. Definition of terms and differentiations in this section are based on [#!FuPic1998!#].
In traditional distributed systems, i.e. systems which do not rely on code mobility, the executable parts reside in a computational environment during their entire lifetimes. In distributed systems following the mobile code paradigm, the executable parts can be moved between computational environments.
The main aspects of mobile code are: mobility mechanisms, design paradigms and application domains.
The mobility mechanism enables an application to move executable code between computational environments. The design paradigm benefits from the mobility mechanisms and describe concepts of distributed applications which rely on mobile code. Where mobile code is useful and improves distributed application performance is covered by the section on application domains.