This paper presents a mobile agent approach that aims at satisfying the following requirements of open Internet-based electronic service markets: the mobile agent system should be usable by any Internet user without a need for specifically configurated non-standard software tools. It should reduce costs in mobile computing environments and therefore enhance overall efficiency. It should suit well to an electronic service market where local services are commercially offered and business transactions predominate the interaction between customers and suppliers. As a part of the project OSM (Open Service Model), mobile agents are built on top of two well-established technologies: CORBA and Java. The first is used as a conceptual framework for interoperability, the latter as the programming environment. Since Java does not provide the necessary persistency of execution state, the concept of OSM service profiles is used to embed Java classes and to transfer a coarse-grained execution contex...