Abstract: Mobile agents based computing has been propounded as the possible approach to next generation computing. The approach has been shown to be effective in different domains, especially in the area of mobile and partially connected computing. We describe the design and implementation details of MAGENTA (Mobile AGENT environment for distributed Applications) and the mechanisms it provides for enabling applications supporting mobile users. MAGENTA is a generic mobile agent environment and provides the agents the capabilities of autonomy, reactivity, proactivity and communication. In order to demonstrate the functionalities provided by MAGENTA to mobile users we have applied it in the domain of network management in order to implement a Mobile Network Manager (MNM). We also present the performance evaluation results of MAGENTA.