On Maintaining Code Mobility

We introduce the aspect of maintenance to code mobility with its major problem of keeping track of code migrating through computer networks. Our approach introduces the concept of mobile, lightweight knowledge repositories to support the maintenance of applications deploying mobile code in highly distributed computing environments. Our proposed system establishes a virtual global database with information about the mobile application and its surrounding environment based on distributed structured XML-based knowledge repositories. These distributed databases provide well-defined structural query and retrieval capabilities and ensure the abstraction from programming languages and proprietary hardware platforms. Finally, we point out several future research issues in the field of maintaining mobile code with respect to automatic maintenance of applications and automatic quality checking among others.