*Result*: A Java-based Mobile Agent Framework for Distributed Network Applications.

*Recently, a new paradigm has emerged for structuring and developing distributed network applications in open distributed and heterogeneous environments. Many application areas, such as electronic commerce, mobile computing, network management and information retrieval can benefit from the application of the Mobile Agent technology. The exploitation of Mobile Agents offers several peculiar advantages, such as reduction of network latency, asynchronous execution, robust and fault tolerant behavior. Java technology provides a platform-independent, portable software environment which makes it an excellent tool for mobile agent development. Mobile Agents are mainly intended to be used for applications distributed over large scale (slow) networks because they allow saving communication costs by moving computation to the host on which the target data resides. However, it has not become popular due to some problems such as security. In this paper, we present a distributed network architecture based on the Mobile Agent approach. A network of communicating servers each of which support multiple clients is our goal. We also propose a security approach for mobile agents, which protect critical data of mobile agents from malicious attacks, by using cryptographic techniques. We implement a bank service application to be tested on our mobile agent framework. The results suggest that for networks with high latency, Mobile Agents may provide improvements over more conventional client-server systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]*