WhiteCat mewls

After 6 months since its creation, the WhiteCat approach is becoming more concrete day by day. I'm proud to say that a paper I wrote with the collaboration and support of Dr. Haibin Zhu, has been accepted to IEEE CTS 2009 with a really good revision. During my academic life I've never seen a paper accepted as it is with a lot of accomplishment, and this is what happen with the four revisors assigned to the WhiteCat paper.

During the writing of this paper, the development of the frameork has continued and the framework is now improved. Most notably changes and improvements are the followings:

• the RoleEngine has changed name, and it is now called RoleBooster. The motivation behind this is that the word engine could be misleading, and since the idea is to have a boosting of interaction and behaviour capabilities (thru roles), this name is more appropriate;
• the agent proxy now can be identified thru an unique identifier (that in the simpler case is a sequence number), automatically generated at the time of the proxy creation. Such identifier is copyied thru proxy manipulations, so that after a role assumption a proxy will have the same identity. The meaning of this is to allow a client (e.g., an agent) to know that two different proxies refers to the same agent (i.e., they have the same identity);
• an AOP-based notification system has been developed. It is now possible to register an event listener to a proxy and be notified about role assumptions/releases (i.e., proxy manipulations). The idea behind this is to allow agents to be notified about the needing of a proxy update due to a bytecode manipulation;
• the proxy update mechanism has been completed. Now there is a central map that stores the last version available of each proxy (indexed by the proxy identity). When a proxy update is required, the proxy is extracted from this map. Proxies are inserted in the map after a succesfull bytecode manipulation by an aspect.

A lot of work has been done, and there's a lot to do yet!
Stay tuned for updates!