Application-Level Virtualization Technology In Personal Play-on-Demand Software Service

Today, the traditional mode of software distribution is the mainstream in software industry. However, this mode, which includes purchasing, installing, using, maintaining and updating, has several drawbacks– personal users cannot transplant their personalized computing environments, while enterprise users have to be burdened with huge cost of PCs ownership. In this situation, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) becomes a main trend for software deployment. SaaS can effectively solve the above problems through the personal play-on-demand software service.This dissertation presents our research works on the application-level virtualization technology in personal play-on-demand software service, and then introduces how to adopt this technology for the real implementation of personal portable computing environment, Desktop2Go, which realizes the mobility of personal computing environment as well as play-on-demand software distribution through the Internet.The main contributions of our works include:(1) Introduction of application-level virtualization technology to portable user computing environment and the real implementation of this technique in Desktop2Go system. Application-level virtualization is more efficient and flexible than virtualizations on any other level.(2) Design and implementation of virtual environment for applications. To build the virtual environment, we must firstly identify the initial resource set for applications to run. Then we implement the virtual registry and the virtual file system. The virtual registry is the pivot in this dissertation. It includes two functions - one is private registry, which is similar to Windows registry; the other is the API-inception module, which incepts and redirects API's.(3) Integration of P2P downloading module for Internet-based software distribution to Desktop2Go. P2P downloading technique can lower server's overload greatly and utilize the resources on the Internet adequately.This virtual environment supports lots of common Windows software, thus it can fulfill the need of most users. We also have tested its performance and ensure that it can completely satisfy the practical applications requirements.