In my last post I went into the the history of semi-autonomous software agents in a fair amount of detail, going as far back as the late 1970's and the beginning of formal research in the field in the early 1980's. Now I'm going to pop open the hood and go into some detail about how agents are architected in the context of how they work, some design issues and constraints, and some of the other technologies that they can use or bridge. I'm also going to talk a little about agents' communication protocols, both those used to communiate amongst …