| With increasing pervasiveness of the Internet, users are becoming accustomed to accessing their applications and data from anywhere. Vendors providing software-as-a-service enjoy diminished piracy and more consistent revenue. However, we are approaching the practical limits of what can be done within the stateless web browser architecture. A new architecture is needed which will allow Internet applications to be written as single cohesive applications, where the physical location of code and data are not a major factor in the design of the application. This will allow Internet applications to be developed rapidly and to simplify maintenance. The details of client/server implementation would no longer interfere with the application architecture. We introduce the Pip system which implements such a transparent system for creating Internet applications.;This work details the limitations of the current Internet application architectures and technologies, and examines other recent technologies which attempt to address some of these limitations. We also look at past distributed application systems, both academic and commercial, to see how innovations might be applied to the domain of Internet applications. We introduce the Pip system and explain specific features that address our goals, and investigate methods to overcome potential pitfalls in implementing transparent locality. We specifically address the issue of performance of distributed applications and how optimal performance can be achieved while involving the developer as little as possible, to the end that we maintain the local application development model. Finally, we present details of the current implementation, performance tests verifying the effectiveness of our performance optimizations, and directions for future work with respect to performance as well as security and reliability. |
