The paper is more of an evaluation of technology than deep research, and as such the information here will go stale very quickly. For instance, interesting things have happened at General Magic since I wrote the paper. There's a more up-to-date article (July 97) comparing Java mobile agent systems titled "A Hands-On Look at Java Mobile Agents" by Joseph Kiniry and Daniel Zimmerman. It can be found in the July/August issue of IEEE Internet Computing.
Loosely coordinated distributed computation and mobile agents are a very active area for me. Please contact me if you have any thoughts about what I have written here. The ideas in the paper I'm most interested in pursuing include economic control of computations, security issues of mobile agents (in particular, protecting agents from hostile servers), and thinking more about what an Internet full of mobile agents would be like.