flowSGi

flowSGi

http://flowsgi.inf.ethz.ch/

"flowSGi is an approach for a Collaborative Middleware for Mobile Devices. It brings together the paradigm of Fluid Computing and the dynamic of the OSGi. The project was initiated as a master's thesis by Jan S. Rellermeyer and is now an ongoing research project at Information and Communication Systems Research Group (IKS) at ETH Zurich."

"Fluid Computing is a promising approach to handle data synchronization among mobile devices or other network peers. The weakly consistent character of fluid systems allows offline modifications of data and reconciliation when the device returns to the network. Both application data and state can be transferred from one peer to another. It is possible to federate devices and make them act like a single entity. flowSGi is a collaborative middleware.

An early example of a weakly consistent data system is PARC Xerox Bayou?. The term fluid computing? has been coined by a recent research project at IBM Zurich Research Laboratories.

flowSGi combines the flexibility of the fluid paradigm with the dynamics of the OSGi service platform. Not only application state and data is fluid within a network, even the application themselves can flow through the network.

IBM's Fluid Middleware uses a strict Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and requires the developer to write models for every type of fluid data. flowSGi however operates on Java objects. Common data types are already implemented as Fluid Objects, custom data types or special conflict semantics can be easily implemented by extending existing objects or writing new Fluid objects. "