Fruitlets - a Kind of Mobile Component

This page gives a short description of a Master's Thesis project developed during 1996 in the Software Composition Group of the University of Berne. The project was carried out by Juerg Gertsch. The advisor of the thesis was Karl Guggisberg.
A copy of my master thesis is available in postscript or pdf.


Introduction

The tremendous growth of the Internet, especially the popularity of the World-Wide-Web service led to new situations and problems of software applications. Thus, we can observe a new application domain of software entities which appeared in the last few years and which demands for new requirements.

The thesis deals with an approach in the field of mobile code systems within networking environments. We discuss special stateless mobile software entities and describe a basic software layer in order to deal with such stateless mobile components. We use such abstractions in order to attain adaptability and openness during system's run-time.

Thesis Description

The discussion about general problems and requirements leads to a survey of available technologies in the field. Afterward, we restrict ourselves to a kind of stateless mobile components and we define properties and demands of such components.

We introduce the notion "fruitlet" for such special stateless mobile component and show a prototype of a basic software architecture/environment in order to host "fruitlets".

The middle part of the thesis deals with a prototype implementation of our technology. We use the Java programming language as the implementation language.

The last part of the thesis describes the implementation of a few examples developed with our technology. These examples show applications which are dynamically extendable in a restricted way during run-time and startup-time with stateless mobile components. Furthermore, such applications can also exchange software parts under some circumstances during run-time.

References

[1] Juerg Gertsch, Software Composition with Mobile Code Talk overheads, November 95.


Last updated: Mon Jul 28 1997 by juerg.gertsch@x400.gr.admin.ch