Mobile code with Erlang

[Samuel Tardieu]

JA> I have began to work with mobile agents (roughly speaking,
JA> programs that are able to travel across the nodes of a network)
JA> and I have observed that most of them are written in Java. Despite
JA> the (relative) slowness of this language, some mobile agents are
JA> used for packet-routing, for send video on demand, etc.

Erlang has not been open-sourced for a long time, which explain IMO
the low number of Erlang applications found on the Internet.

If I had to choose one language to start developing mobile agents, I
would choose Erlang without any hesitation.

JA> I would like to know whether Erlang is powerful enough to develop
JA> a similar framework using this language instead of Java.

According to my experience, Erlang programs run much faster than their
Java counterpart. Moreover, the hot code-swapping feature should make
it very practical to update mobile agents without bringing them down.

  Sam
-- 
Samuel Tardieu -- sam@REDACTED