6. Agent Coordination via Scripting Languages

In recent years, so-called scripting languages have become increasingly popular as they provide means to build quickly flexible applications from a set of prefabricated components. These languages typically support a single, specific architectural style of composing components (e.g. the pipes and filters architectural style), and they are designed to address a specific application domain. Although scripting languages and coordination languages have evolved from different roots and have been developed to solve different problems, we argue that both address similar separations of concerns. Scripting languages achieve a separation of components from the scripts that configure and compose them, whilst coordination languages separate computational entities from the coordination code that manages dependencies between them. In this chapter we will define coordination in the context of a conceptual framework for component-based software development. Furthermore, we will discuss main properties and abstractions of scripting languages and will compare selected scripting languages with respect to the identified core concepts. Finally, using a small set of sample applications, we will illustrate the power and the limitations of these concepts in order to define agent coordination.