Agent-based computing has been advocated by many researchers and software developers as a promising and innovative way to model, design and implement complex Web-related applications. KODAMA (Kyushu university Open & Distributed Autonomous MultiAgent) project, which is described in this paper, is our endeavour to advance both the technology and engineering of well-known multiagent systems. In particular, we have noted that software agents might be the potential solution to many problems faced by today's Web. However, building a high-quality, large-scale multiagent system, which can operate in open environments, is a great challenge. So far, we have devoted a lot of effort to design and implement a generic agent architecture, a hierarchical agent community structure, and an independent network communication middleware. To ensure that KODAMA can be used to create Web-agent applications, its network communication performance and a prototype distributed database retrieval system have been tested. The result shows that KODAMA is suitable for developing network-aware applications.