research-article

Migration of Web Applications with Seamless Execution

Authors:

Soo-Mook MoonAuthors Info & Claims

VEE '15: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

Pages 173 - 185

https://doi.org/10.1145/2731186.2731197

Published: 14 March 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Web applications (apps) are programmed using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and are distributed in the source code format. Web apps can be executed on any devices where a web browser is installed, allowing one-source, multi-platform environment. We can exploit this advantage of platform independence for a new user experience called app migration, which allows migrating an app in the middle of execution seamlessly between smart devices. This paper proposes such a migration framework for web apps where we can save the current state of a running app and resume its execution on a different device by restoring the saved state. We save the web app's state in the form of a snapshot, which is actually another web app whose execution can restore the saved state. In the snapshot, the state of the JavaScript variables and DOM trees are saved using the JSON format. We solved some of the saving/restoring problems related to event handlers and closures by accessing the browser and the JavaScript engine internals. Our framework does not require instrumenting an app or changing its source code, but works for the original app. We implemented the framework on the Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript engine and successfully migrated non-trivial sample apps with reasonable saving and restoring overhead. We also discuss other usage of the snapshot for optimizations and user experiences for the web platform.

References

[1]

M. Adiba and B. Lindsay. "Database snapshots." Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Very Large Data Bases, 1980.

Digital Library

[2]

Adobe Flash runtime. http://www.adobe.com/products/flashruntimes.html

[3]

Airplay. https://www.apple.com/airplay/

[4]

Apple Handoff, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2014, https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/, Jun 2014.

[5]

B. Chun et. al, CloneCloud: elastic execution between mobile device and cloud. In Proceedings of the sixth conference on Computer systems (EuroSys '11). 2011.

Digital Library

[6]

Browser extension. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_extension

[7]

D. Lee. JXON: an Architecture for Schema and Annotation Driven JSON/XML Bidirectional Transformations. In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011.

[8]

DLNA. http://www.dlna.org/

[9]

Dropbox. https://www.dropbox.com

[10]

Enyojs. http://enyojs.com

[11]

F. Bellucci et. al, Engineering JavaScript state persistence of web applications migrating across multiple devices. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems (EICS '11). 2011.

Digital Library

[12]

Firefox OS. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os

[13]

G. Wang. Improving Data Transmission in Web Applications via the Translation between XML and JSON. In Proceedings of the 2011 Third International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing (CMC '11). 2011.

Digital Library

[14]

HTML5. http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

[15]

J. Lo et. al, Imagen: runtime migration of browser sessions for javascript web applications. In Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web (WWW '13). 2013.

Digital Library

[16]

J. Mickens, J. Elson, and J. Howell. Mugshot: deterministic capture and replay for Javascript applications. In Proceedings of Networked Systems Design and Implementation, pages 159--174, 2010.

Digital Library

[17]

jQuery. http://www.jquery.com

[18]

JSON. http://www.json.org

[19]

Json.NET - Preserving Object References. http://james.newtonking.com/json/help/index.html

[20]

JSON-Circular. https://github.com/StewartAtkins/JSON-Circular

[21]

JsonML. http://www.jsonml.org/

[22]

JSON-R: A JSON Extension That Deals With Object References (Circular And Others). http://java.dzone.com/articles/json-r-json-extension-deals

[23]

K. Baik et. al. Boosting up Embedded Linux device: experience on Linux-based Smartphone. In proceedings of the Linux Symposium. 2010.

[24]

N. Nurseitov et al,. Comparison of JSON and XML Data Interchange Formats: A Case Study. In Proceedings of CAINE, 9, 157--162. 2009.

[25]

Offline Tetris. http://tetris.alexkessinger.net/

[26]

PS4 Remote Play. https://support.us.playstation.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5065/~/ps4-remote-play-and-second-screen

[27]

Ext JS. http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs

[28]

Serialization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization

[29]

Sync tabs across devices. https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2591582?hl=en

[30]

Takashi Suezawa. Persistent execution state of a Java virtual machine. In Proceedings of the ACM 2000 conference on Java Grande (JAVA '00). 2000.

Digital Library

[31]

Tizen. https://www.tizen.org

[32]

V8 snapshot. https://developers.google.com/v8/embed

[33]

webOS. http://www.openwebosproject.org

[34]

Y.-Y. Su and J. Flinn. Slingshot: deploying stateful services in wireless hotspots. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services (MobiSys '05). 2005.

Digital Library

[35]

B. Burg et al, Interactive record/replay for web application debugging. Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. 2013.

Digital Library

[36]

J. Oh and S. Moon, Snapshot-based Loading-Time Acceleration for Web Applications. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2015). 2015.

Digital Library

Cited By

Kim JMoon S(2022)Disclosure: Efficient Instrumentation-Based Web App Migration for Liquid ComputingWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-09917-5_9(132-147)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09917-5_9
Yoo YMoon S(2021)Snapshot-Based Migration of ES6 JavaScriptWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_31(404-419)Online publication date: 11-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_31
Jeong HJeong IMoon S(2020)Dynamic Offloading of Web Application Execution Using SnapshotACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/340212414:4(1-24)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3402124
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Migration of Web Applications with Seamless Execution
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments
      2. Source code generation

Recommendations

Live migration of JavaScript web apps
WWW '13 Companion: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web

Due to the increasing complexity of web applications and emerging HTML5 standards, a large amount of runtime state is created and managed in the user's browser. While such complexity is desirable for user experience, it makes it hard for developers to ...
Web Application Migration with Closure Reconstruction
WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

Due to its high portability and simplicity, web application (app) based on HTML/JavaScript/CSS has been widely used for various smart-device platforms. To take advantage of its wide platform pool, a new idea called app migration has been proposed for ...
Imagen: runtime migration of browser sessions for javascript web applications
WWW '13: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web

Due to the increasing complexity of web applications and emerging HTML5 standards, a large amount of runtime state is created and managed in the user's browser. While such complexity is desirable for user experience, it makes it hard for developers to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

VEE '15: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

March 2015

238 pages

ISBN:9781450334501

DOI:10.1145/2731186

General Chair:
Ada Gavrilovska
Georgia Tech
,
Program Chairs:
Angela Demke Brown
University of Toronto
,
Bjarne Steensgaard
Microsoft

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 50, Issue 7
VEE '15
July 2015
221 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2817817
Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 March 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

VEE '15

Sponsor:

VEE '15: 11th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments

March 14 - 15, 2015

Istanbul, Turkey

Acceptance Rates

VEE '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 16 of 50 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 235 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

23
Total Citations
View Citations
620
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)14
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 10 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kim JMoon S(2022)Disclosure: Efficient Instrumentation-Based Web App Migration for Liquid ComputingWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-09917-5_9(132-147)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09917-5_9
Yoo YMoon S(2021)Snapshot-Based Migration of ES6 JavaScriptWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_31(404-419)Online publication date: 11-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74296-6_31
Jeong HJeong IMoon S(2020)Dynamic Offloading of Web Application Execution Using SnapshotACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/340212414:4(1-24)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3402124
Kwon JLee HMoon S(2020)WebDelta: Lightweight Migration of Web Applications with Modified Execution StateWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_29(435-450)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_29
Jung KGascon‐Samson JGoyal SRezaiean‐Asel APattabiraman K(2020)ThingsMigrate: Platform‐independent migration of stateful JavaScript Internet of Things applicationsSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.293651:1(117-155)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2936
Van der Cruysse JHoste LVan Raemdonck WScholliers CChari G(2019)FlashFreeze: low-overhead JavaScript instrumentation for function serializationProceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection10.1145/3358502.3361268(31-39)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358502.3361268
Jeong HShin CShin KLee HMoon S(2019)Seamless Offloading of Web App Computations From Mobile Device to Edge Clouds via HTML5 Web Worker MigrationProceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing10.1145/3357223.3362735(38-49)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3357223.3362735
Kim JLee HMoon SBrandenburg BSankaranarayanan S(2018)Fast snapshot migration using static code instrumentationProceedings of the International Conference on Embedded Software10.5555/3283535.3283540(1-2)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3283535.3283540
Park JPark JLee YKim CKim BRyu SMarr SSartor J(2018)A framework for dynamic inter-device task dispatch with eventual consistencyCompanion Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming10.1145/3191697.3191732(63-68)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3191697.3191732
Luxey ABromberg YCosta FLima Vda Rocha RTaiani F(2018)Sprinkler: A probabilistic dissemination protocol to provide fluid user interaction in multi-device ecosystems2018 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom)10.1109/PERCOM.2018.8444577(1-10)Online publication date: Mar-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2018.8444577
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents