Migratory Applications

We introduce a new genre of user interface applications that can migrate from one machine to another, taking their user interface and application contexts with them, and continue from where they left off. Such applications are not tied to one user or one machine, and can roam freely over the network, rendering service to a community of users, gathering human input and interacting with people. We envisage that this will support many new agent-based collaboration metaphors. The ability to migrate executing programs has applicability to mobile computing as well. Users can have their applications travel with them, as they move from one computing environment to another.We present an elegant programming model for creating migratory applications and describe an implementation.The biggest strength of our implementation is that the details of migration are completely hidden from the application programmer; arbitrary user interface applications can be migrated by a single ÒmigrationÓ command....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: UIST
• Authors: Krishna Bharat, Luca Cardelli
• Keywords: Agent-based Collaboration Metaphors, Software Engineering, UIST 1995, User Interface, User Interface Applications