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The popularity of the Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based approaches for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability, and robustness. In this paper, we propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports lightweight, portable, and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow or expensive networks. The implementation of the framework using the aglet workbench shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. We expect our framework to perform even better when deployed using different implementation platforms as indicated by our preliminary results from an implementation based on Voyager. © 2000 IEEE. 12 5 802 820 Conference code: 57579 Cited By :80

The undeniable popularity of the web makes the efficient accessing of distributed databases from web clients an important topic. Various methods for web database integration have been proposed but recently there is an increasing interest on those based on Java-based ones. This is due to the inherent advantages of Java, which supports platform independence and secure program execution, and produces a small size of compiled code. In this experimental paper, we evaluate all currently available Java-based approaches. These include Java applets, Java Sockets, Servlets, Remote Method Invocation, CORBA, and Mobile Agents. To this end, we implemented a Web client accessing a remote database using each of these approaches and compared their behavior along the following important parameters: (1) performance expressed in terms of response time under different loads, (2) transparency of communication expressed in terms of complexity of networking API, and (3) extensibility expressed in terms of ease of adding new components. 1 290 293 Sponsors: IEEE Conference code: 57861 Cited By :1

The popularity of Web as a universal access mechanism for network information has created the need for developing web-based DBMS client/server applications. However, the current commercial applet-based methodologies for accessing database systems offer limited flexibility, scalability and robustness. In this paper, we propose a new framework for Web-based distributed access to database systems based on Java-based mobile agents. The framework supports light-weight, portable and autonomous clients as well as operation on slow expensive networks. The implementation of the framework shows that its performance is comparable to, and in some case outperforms, the current approach. In fact, in wireless and dial-up environments and for average size transactions, a client/agent/server adaptation of the framework provides a performance improvement of approximately a factor of ten. For the fixed network, the gains are about 40% and 30% respectively. 228 237 Sponsors: IEEE Conference code: 55096 Cited By :31