TACOMA Software Distributions

TOS (April 2002): TOS is a lightweight distributed computing middleware platform. It provides a secure message passing mechanism and a simple framework for implementing application specific message handlers (extensions). TOS has changed from being a pure mobile code platform to a generic toolkit for building closed distributed communication infrastructures.

TACOMA v2.0 (September 1999): A brand new (beta) release, with redesigned communication primitives and state handling primitives. Supports binary data better, and allows mobile agents to communicate and syncronize with each other through the await() primitive.

TACOMA v1.2 (April 1996): Offers better portability and is much more stable than the previous versions. Should work on most Unix systems. It supports multiple programming languages: C, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python and Scheme. In addition, this TACOMA version can be installed in a World Wide Web environment by adding the following:

• The tac_web agent is used to make a TACOMA site accessible through a web interface. By installing this (perl CGI-bin) script at the server, clients (without any TACOMA support) can ship TACOMA agents to the server.

• The client does not have to install any additional software. However, the client must fill in a HTML form with TACOMA agent code and parameters. To support this process, this TACOMA script can be used.