Telescript is General Magic's interpreted, object-oriented language with for remote programming. It uses an active agents paradigm. Agent programs are sent to places where they execute, possibly in conjunction with other agents. Agents can move themselves to new places to execute, taking their state with them. Places are subprocesses associated with a Telescript Engine, which is a server program which may be integrated with an HTTP server (with CGI) to produce what they describe as an active web server. This is similar architecturally to ParcPlace's VisualWave and IBM's WWWParts, both for Smalltalk. Agents are mobile in that their site of computation can move from one place to another, but they can only execute in the context of a Telescript engine, so agent programs should not be considered client programs, as Telescript provides no runtime
support on the www client side to execute agents. This separates them from Java applets, for instance, which move computation from web servers to clients. Telescript moves computation in a different direction, from one web server to other web servers. The Telescript language itself is similar to C++, but is specialized to support the agent paradigm with built-in support for moving agents and interacting with other agents, and supports advanced memory management, including the persistence of all objects. Like Java, Telescript is safe and platform-independent.
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