The software agent paradigm is the perfect paradigm to do prototyping in. Ideally, it abstracts the nastiness of network programming allowing the designer to concentrate on the content being communicated between to elements in the system. The only problem is that there are no decent, openly available agent platforms written for C++, so if you want to go the agent route you get trapped into using Java. I don't particularly enjoy programming in Java, and as a matter of fact the end application must be in C++ anyway, so this is a problem.
WWDC 2004 Keynote
I just watched the entire Keynote from WWDC 2004 'Frisco. Steve Jobs demonstrated
Tiger, Apple's next major release of OS X. It is simply amazing! Goto their web site and view the demo.
