DATE: Thursday, February 5, 2009
TIME: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220
SPEAKER: Jon Howell, Microsoft Research
TITLE:
Xax: Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Applications on the Web
ABSTRACT:
Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechanisms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall interface, an abstraction layer that provides a consistent binary interface across operating systems, system services via hooks to existing browser mechanisms, and lightweight modifications to existing tool chains and code bases. We demonstrate a variety of applications and libraries from existing code bases, in several languages, produced with various tool chains, running in multiple browsers on multiple operating systems. With roughly two person-weeks of effort, we ported 3.3 million lines of code to Xax, including a PDF viewer, a Python interpreter, a speech synthesizer, and an OpenGL pipeline.
PDF: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/72878/xax-osdi08.pdf
BIO:
Jon works at the intersection of security and scalability in distributed systems. His recent projects focus on the convergence of utility computing and web-delivered applications. He has worked on the novel Asirra Captcha, a rigorous proof of correctness for Paxos, the Farsite distributed filesystem, and cross-domain authentication.
Visitor Host: Greg Ganger
Visitor Coordinator: Karen Lindenfelser
SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/