C2AS: A System Supporting Distributed Web Applications Composed of Collaborating Agents

In this paper we describe the Cambridge Collaborative Agent System (C2AS). This is a prototype system designed to demonstrate the functionality and basic architecture of a framework for co-ordination between different components (or agents) of distributed ‘Web’ applications. Co-ordination in C2AS is achieved through the use of tuple spaces, as used in Linda. However, the access primitives used in C2AS are not those used by Linda, but the BONITA primitives, which provide asynchronous access to tuple spaces as opposed to synchronous access. Because C2AS is tuple space based it supports temporal and spatial separation of agents. The prototype system supports agents written in either Java (including applets) or C.