Background

There are a variety of agent and application servers currently available to the Java™ community. Most of these platforms are monolithic in nature, and often require the adoption of additional features, programming idioms, and setup procedures that are not critical to the overall application design.

In almost all cases, what should be a simple application ends up as a large, expensive, ill-conceived, and complex development task requiring a learning investment above and beyond the standard JDK. Some of these platforms even task the developer with learning another language or scripting environment that has nothing at all to do with Java™. Others involve a proprietary build process or source code preprocessor adding complexity to the build process.

Few of these platforms are truly cross-platform compatible, with support for only the most popular Java-enabled platforms. Few of them are small enough to be useable on embedded devices. Few of them offer unlimited compatibility with other platforms and existing APIs. Most of these platforms are restrictive in nature.

While there are also a variety of licensing options available, most of them are expensive and/or restrictive in some way which protects the interests of the platform vendor. Often these interests are in conflict with the developers needs and available resources. A platform which may perfectly fit the requirements of a specific application may require the purchase of costly software licenses before any real benefits can be realized.

The Comet Way Agent Kernel fills in the gaps by providing an open and consistent environment where agents can access existing java-enabled technologies and benefit from their shared use.