Re: Another approach to agent architecture [ was Re: agents .. ]

Hi,

> I've been following the recent discussion with interest here!  It seems to
> me what may be critical to the success of safe-tcl is going to be the
> "killer app" rather than the language wars.  Ultimately people use what
> works and what fills the bill at the moment (witness DOS).  Maybe I've
> missed it, but I've hardly seen any safe-tcl applications at all. How
> about a listserve or majordomo based on safe-tcl as a possibly something
> people might use right away.  It could also include some groupware sorts
> of things like voting, easy to use community archives and such. 

I'm new to this discussion but it seems that you should take a look at
Java (http://java.sun.com/). It has all the features of Safe-Tcl, it is
secure, the performance is better, and it is freely available.

> Also, I didn't see any mention of Telescript in relation to ALF.  I know
> it's propriertary and so far bundled with MagicCap, but from what I know
> it has a lot of features that safe-tcl doesn't have.  For example, the
> meet and go operations and the directory services all that allow agents to
> know where to go and do things.  It seems these can either be part of ALF
> in which case safe-tcl has a ways to go, or they have to be layered on top
> of ALF in another standard.  They seem important to agent-based products
> to me. 

Isn't TeleScript like Tcl but with postfix notation? Isn't TeleScript a 
propriatery language? 

> Last, the Netscape-Adobe deal that puts an Acrobat viewer in the Netscape
> browser piqued my interest.  PostScript is a full language that could do
> agent stuff.  Anyone think this is on Adobe's agenda?  They could have
> software to run "PostScript Agents" on many peoples desk in a matter of
> months! 

I believe that Acrobat only supports PDS, but I may be wrong. PDS is
not a full PostScript language implementation. It only supports the
graphics primitives.  For a language to be useful in a WWW browser you
need much more that a "full" language. You need a complete
infrastructure for embedding, security, internet libraries etc.
PostScript is not appropriate for that.

Have fun,

	Arthur van Hoff (avh@eng.sun.com)
	http://java.sun.com/people/avh/
	Sun Microsystems Inc, M/S UPAL02-301,
	100 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301, USA
	Tel: +1 415 473 7242, Fax: +1 415 473 7104

Received on Thursday, 13 April 1995 13:16:43 UTC