Per the message that seems to have sparked this thread I have been thinking of stuff related to this topic for quite a while.
One idea is to use my ActiveCapCert (WIP) to describe certain kinds of custom unums implementations making them portable/migratable/copyable yet retaining their providence of their code.
Example of such is an unum acting as either part of a ToonTalk Nest-Bird pair. Possibly with in-order and contigious gurantees of messages sent via bird(s) to nest(s). (Though those can only be easily achived iff the bird end is only in one place which makes use of SAC-lines as the way to achive those aforesaid gurantees.)
What can such birdie nest setup be used for? Well, keeping track of baseball league game scores, cruise ship eatery menus, anything that you do not mind being a bit stale/out-of-date.
Another idea is to use the vocabulary/language of AmbientTalk (doesn’t have to be AmbientTalk, see this for an draft of js sketch) to write usefull applications that uses nearby discoverable resources to achive an users’ task.
And all that traffic carried inside Smart Messages that can be using routing code bricks that use climbing up a gradient of “smell” stratedgy towards a fitting target destination(s). (Heck, techniques from Clueless Software Agents could be used to obscure what spefic kind of target destination is sought.)
Other SmartMessage routing/emigration stratedgies possible might be net flood filling, random walk, “smell” gradient decent (“fleeing the stink”), opertunistic local cache perusal (could nearby nodes have a copy of what the SM is looking for) and probably many more.
One question I have, is how to minimize likely hood of Denial of Service due to attack, over-use, or plainly bad programming. Postage? or some such via token bucket or other such well known mechanisms. (Heck using signed attestations by nodes that each node had proccessed particular SmartMessages, each ided by their hash and origin or something, for distributed reputation-tallying for postage credit/debit score might be how it will be done.)
Btw, sorry for the density of this message, I am willing to expand and elaborate here on request or when I suspect that missunderstanding might arise.