Experiences with a Mobile Process Orientated Middleware

Dominic Cooney, Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 4000. Email: d.cooney@qut.edu.au

Paul Roe, Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Email: p.roe@qut.edu.au

Keywords

mobile process; process migration; mobile agent; migratory application; mobility middleware; .NET

Abstract

The occasional connectivity and limited bandwidth of mobile computing scenarios make remote execution schemes such as Java RMI or remote data manipulation schemes such as Linda brittle and infeasible. Mobile agents can overcome these problems by moving computations to the data they require, however most mobile agent middlewares do not provide programmers good abstraction from the migration mechanism. We present a new framework for writing mobile software applications with stateful mobile processes. Stateful process mobility is induced by preprocessing byte-code, with little need for programmer intervention. The framework has been reused in delivering location-based services; in mobile applications that can be beamed between handled devices via infrared; in distributed, parallel Web service implementations; and in grid computing. In this paper we describe a new application, mobile stateful applets, as an illustrative use of the framework. In this application scenario, running applets can be moved between Web sites, browsers and handheld devices in a stateful way without placing any extra security demands beyond ordinary applets.